Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/umbrage-farm).

**John August:** Hola y buenos días. Soy John August.

**Craig Mazin:** Soy Craig Mazin.

**John:** Este es Scriptnotes, un podcast sobre la escritura cinematográfica y las cosas que se interesan los guionistas. ¿Cómo estás, Craig?

**Craig:** Bien. ¿Y tú?

[Sound effect]

**John:** Sorry, I had it set to Spanish. We’re good to go now.

**Craig:** Okay, great.

**John:** Craig, what does nepotism mean to you?

**Craig:** Nepotism means that favoritism, undue favoritism is shown to a familial relative.

**John:** When I think of nepotism I think of the boss who promotes his inept nephew up to a position that he should not be in, and he only has that job because his father is the boss.

**Craig:** Like Scooter from the Muppets.

**John:** Like Scooter from the Muppets.

**Craig:** Well Scooter turned out to be very good at his job, but I think he got it through nepotism.

**John:** Yeah. That’s fair. So, what nepotism isn’t is being related to somebody famous.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** So, the reason I bring this up, and I sort of hesitate to bring this up because we are recording this on a Wednesday and this podcast will air on a Tuesday, so there is a gap of a week here. So by the time we actually bring it up, the zeitgeist may have moved far beyond this one little thing, but it enraged me so much that I am bringing it up.

So, the show Girls on HBO, I saw on Facebook somebody had done up a poster of like the one sheet that looked like Girls but they changed the word Girls to Nepotism. And then they had these little tags for each of the young actresses in the show, saying like their name and sort of which famous person they are related to, with the not-at-all subtle implication that… — Well it’s not even really implication. It’s pointing out that these women are related and saying nepotism, but it didn’t actually make sense to me, and it sort of enraged me because it’s as if these young women are only in the show because they are related to somebody famous, and not because they are talented actresses.

Or that somehow being related to somebody famous is the reason why you are going to be cast in the show.

**Craig:** Yeah, that was sort of, David Mamet’s daughter and Brian Williams’s daughter. And the strangest one was the daughter of the drummer of Bad Company. [laughs]

**John:** Because you know that the minute she walked into the room, they said like, “Well, oh my god, she doesn’t need to do an audition. Her dad was the drummer to Bad Company, so of course she has to be the person.”

**Craig:** I mean, the fact that they don’t know his name sort of undermines their point. [laughs] Doesn’t it? I mean, how famous is he? He doesn’t even get a name to them; he’s just the “drummer from Bad Company,” a band that last recorded I think in the early ’90s.

**John:** So, really, the actual incident at this point I feel is well passed us, and so that one silly Infographic and whatever — it moves on. But I think the idea of nepotism is sort of poisoning the well. And so I just want to talk a little bit about that, because the idea that this show is on the air, or that these women are cast in the show because of who they are related to I think is a destructive and bad idea. Because it implies that it is not through hard work that someone succeeds; it is through being related to somebody famous that someone succeeds.

And it oversells the importance of being born into the right family, and undersells the importance of hard work.

**Craig:** It’s kind of like an extension of what we talked about last time with this whole trust fund nonsense.

**John:** The Jamie Vanderbilt thing. And, of course, your wealth and your history from those illustrious public school teachers who are…

**Craig:** Right. My trust fund from my public school teacher parents. I mean, it’s the same spirit. All of it comes from a resentment. “I am not making it, and it is only because either my parents weren’t rich, or my parents weren’t famous.”

And I have to say, look, slightly different case. I mean, there is a difference between nepotism and what we were talking about last time, which was this whole trust fund thing. Money isn’t going to make you a good writer. And I don’t think your parent’s money is necessarily going to open any doors for you as a screenwriter.

It is a different story of nepotism — there is nepotism, it does exist. I do believe that if your mom or dad are well placed in the business that you will have opportunities that other people wouldn’t. I mean if my son, who is now ten, grows up and wants to be a screenwriter, I can get him read. And that’s more than the average guy sitting in Indiana can say. So, yeah, that’s real.

**John:** You look at Anne Rice’s son who has become a novelist. Or you look at Stephen King’s son who has become a writer. Ultimately they are going to be judged on their writing, but they had opportunities and access that they wouldn’t have otherwise had with a different name.

**Craig:** That’s right. And I always think about baseball, because I’m a big baseball fan. And three of the greatest hitters that I have seen play are Ken Griffey, Jr., Barry Bonds, and Prince Fielder. All of their dads played baseball. It’s obvious, I think, at first blush that those three kids had more opportunities when they were young than the average kid did, and certainly they had more access to scouts and to attention than the average kid did.

However, they were also — and they are also — really, really, really good. And so what’s interesting about nepotism is that it does sometimes create unfair opportunities, but also when we talk about talent, the whole point of talent is that you don’t learn talent. You’re not taught talent. You have it; that means it’s innate. And on some level there is something neurological going on. If it is music, or literature, or writing, or visual arts, these things are controlled somewhat by the brain. The brain is a function of your genetics. Genetics matters.

It’s not determinative, but it does seem — like it’s hard to discount the fact that a great writer just might pass along some useful genes to a child.

**John:** Yeah. Beyond genes I would also say that a great writer might pass along the chance to see the writer actually doing his or her work.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so if your mother is a famous novelist, you were going to see your mother working day in and day out at a computer, typing up this novel, and you are going to see what that work is. You are going to see the editing; you are going to see what the whole process is. That is going to be an advantage.

But in many ways I think what was frustrating to me about this image or this idea that it is because of who these people’s parents were, well, I’m a product of my parents at least to the same degree. I had supportive parents. God bless them. And I think having supportive parents is a much bigger asset than having rich, or famous, or well-known, or well-connected parents.

**Craig:** I agree with you. I think we live in a time of resentment. I think we are in the middle of a time of resentment. And that’s normal. This is a bad economy and people are suffering. And it is good fertile soil for resentment. But anyone who makes a movie or a television show knows, particularly a television show where you are going to be — you are not casting an episode, you are casting all episodes.

The thought that you would poison your show with somebody because their daddy was somebody is insane and inane. I mean, I don’t know. I haven’t watched the show. Obviously you do, and you like it. I haven’t seen it yet. But they don’t cast David Mamet’s daughter because they think David Mamet is going to come in and do some polishes on the script to make it great, and they are just suffering her.

They cast her because they really liked her. This happens. It’s not the end of the world. Certainly being the daughter of the drummer of Bad Company affords no benefit to the show. The fact that the creator and star of the show’s parents were artists, is it shocking that artists had a kid that was artistic? I mean, really.

And then Brian Williams, who is not an artist, has a daughter who is on the show, and she is objectively beautiful.

**John:** She is objectively beautiful.

**Craig:** And so then, again, it’s like, “Oh my god, a beautiful person is on TV. Stop the presses.” I mean, really?! That’s what? It’s just dumb. And it’s just pointless resentment and I don’t get it. I don’t get it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Look, I’m taking umbrage. Somebody on Twitter said, “Every podcast should be called Craig Mazin takes umbrage at something.” And that is absolutely true.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** My natural state is umbrage. And I just took some.

**John:** Good.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Well let’s get on to some questions.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Nick in LA writes in with a question. “Some management companies refuse to send out writer’s scripts. One person writes about a particularly notorious case, in this instance…” I think it actually came from DoneDealPro that he was first talking about this.

“A well known management company apparently works this way. The sign tons of writers and get them all specing new ideas or rewriting scripts that they think have promise. If one out of twenty pan out, great, they take it out. The rest, the script never goes out, the manager tries to convince the writer to write a new spec. If the writer puts up too much of a fuss, oh well, there are ten more writers in the stable.”

And this is the idea of almost like a spec farm.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So this is a management company that is signing writers who are probably unproduced and having them work on a bunch of stuff, trying to get the best of that stuff and sending that out. The management company in success gets a percentage of that sale, or becomes attached as a producer to that project.

I’d never heard of this term “spec farms.” It sort of disgusts me.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But since this is new to me, I don’t know have specific advice to not being stuck in that management spec farm. But I think it leads to a better overall discussion of what do you do when you think your script is ready to go out on the town, and the people who are representing you don’t think it is ready to go out on the town, which is a case that happens to ever writer at every stage of his career.

**Craig:** I mean, I do think that even in this specific case here of the spec farms, there is some advice to give, and that is avoid them, because any management company that behaves like this isn’t a real management company that anyone gives a damn about.

There are only a few management companies that have any credibility whose imprimatur conveys some sort of legitimacy. And it’s none of them. It’s none of these so-called spec farms. I mean, that’s atrocious behavior. Part of the problem with the whole management business is that it is essentially unregulated agenting. Agents are regulated by the state. They have to be licensed by the state. They cannot produce material. There is a barrier, even a mild barrier for entry.

A manager is somebody that prints up a business card and writes the word manager under their name. And it is the most exploitative aspect of our business, I think. That, to me, low rent managers are where writers get hurt the most. And I know that the managers will say, “Incorrect. We’re the only ones willing to take a chance on these people.”

It’s no chance. You are not taking any chance on anybody. What, are you taking a chance on somebody by putting a stamp on an envelope? Get out of here. I’m taking umbrage again. [laughs]. But my point is I would avoid any management company that isn’t a real management company, or whose manager doesn’t represent real clients, and who seems to be in kind of a bulk business. It’s grotesque, to me.

**John:** Here’s my criteria for whether a manager is a real manager or somebody who is portraying themselves as a manager but isn’t somebody you should be in business with: Has this person produced any movies or TV shows recently? There are managers who have credits that are from ten years ago, but haven’t done anything meaningful in the last five or ten years. Those are not people you really want to be working with.

You need to figure out who their other clients are, and being able to talk to some of their other clients. You don’t sign with one of these companies unless you have talked to another client. And if they are not willing to let you talk to one of their other clients, they are probably not the right place to be doing business with.

**Craig:** I agree.

**John:** I know that a lot of times it is like, “Well, beggars can’t be choosers.” It’s like the only person who seems interested in you. It’s a fairly easily annulled marriage, but it is sort of a marriage. This person is going to be speaking on your behalf and you are going to be talking to them on the phone all the time. Don’t say yes to the first guy who proposes. That’s just not…

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m going to say something that may lead us down a dispiriting path, but it’s really important, I think.

You are not a beggar if your script is good. You are a chooser. If your script is good it will be noticed and it will be noticed by legitimate people, and you will be afforded some choices. If your script is bad, and yes, some of you have bad scripts, what ends up happening is there are these lint traps out there who just gather the substandard material and attempt to peddle it off for the value of the idea, so that better writers can come and rewrite it, but the manager accrues the benefit when the movie gets made, not the original writer. But it’s all a very cynical arrangement. It’s a meat market.

It is a marriage of the mediocre. Mediocre managers looking for mediocre writers to push mediocre material in the hopes of essentially profiting from the literary equivalent of junk bonds.

And if you believe that your script is good, you have to get out of the mindset that you are a beggar, because you are not.

**John:** Now let’s talk to the more general case, which is not necessarily working for one of these terrible management companies, but every screenwriter is going to be at a place with a project that says, “I think we are done here for now. I think we are ready to show this to other people.” This could be a spec that you are taking out on the town, or it could be, “I think we are ready to go out and look for a director.” And the other decision maker, or decision makers say, “No, let’s hold back a little bit. Let’s do a little bit more work.” That is a frustrating situation that you will never fully move on from in your career.

And so this will happen, this has happened on several projects I have been involved with over… — Some of which we are still debating do we take it out to people, do we not take it out to people? At some point you have to draw a line and say, “I am not going to be doing anymore work until we have some progress on going out to other people,” because you can rewrite something for forever.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And you just end up in this trap. So, how do you manage this conversation? I will start, but you may have some different perspectives.

**Craig:** Go for it.

**John:** First you tell your reps what you feel like. “I cannot rewrite this anymore. We have to go out and we have to get somebody else onboard.” And you get their support on this. And if they don’t support you on this, well then you have rep problems. But you have to get their support on this.

And then you make it clear that whatever the next batch of work is, you listen to them about what the next batch of work is, and you may agree, you may disagree, but you say like, “I don’t think we can do this next thing of work until either we go out to this list of directors,” or like, “let’s make this list of directors.” Or, “We need to take this out on the town because right now we are trying to write this to one imaginary buyer rather than sort of the people who actually may make this movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. This comes up all the time, and it comes up in every level. The first question I try and ask is, “Whose opinion do I trust more, mine or theirs?” And it is not always mine. There are producers who really do understand what is going to attract certain directors or certain actors. Oftentimes they have worked with those directors or actors before.

I’m thinking of, for instance, like Michael and Carla Shamberg and Stacey Sher. They have been producing for a long time. They know what is going to theoretically attract and what is not going to attract. And if they say, “Okay, you know, we need another pass,” I believe it. And if they say, “No, this is good enough,” I believe that too.

There is a negotiation that has to go on there where you are not just talking about what makes the best screenplay, but also what gets you close enough to the whole.

Now, the important thing to understand is everybody reacts differently to a screenplay. There are producers, and I call them just like — I think of them as just Nervous Nellies — who are trying to basically make the movie on the paper the way they see it. And suddenly you realize they are not actually producing at all. They are kind of shadow directing on paper, which is a fun game for them, and I understand that this is a very high stakes poker thing for them because they are not going to get paid if the movie doesn’t get made, whereas you will get paid if the movie sells.

But the truth is, that kind of picayune stuff gets blown out of the water the second somebody reads it and says, “I really like this. I see a whole bunch of different things I want to do with this.” And you realize, boy, you would have seen that five months ago. You would have seen that a year ago. And more to the point, I wouldn’t have ever stopped, looked at my screen and said, “I’m not really sure what I am doing anymore.”

If you get to that place where you feel lost or you are straying from your goal, or what you believe in, it’s done. Stop.

**John:** A lot of times what this hold up is is that there is some bigger decision maker they need to actually turn it into, and they don’t feel confident turning it into that decision maker. It could be the studio chief. It could be the head producer at the company. They are nervous to turn it in. And it may have actually nothing to do with your project. It may be their own insecurity about like how they are holding onto their job, or this other project which is going awry, or something that they know about that person’s personal life that makes it a really bad time for them to read it.

To a certain degree, you can give them some latitude there. If they say, “This is going to be a bad weekend to give it to him because of this reason,” trust that. But not every weekend can be a bad weekend. At some point they actually have to do their job. And people have to read the script and say what they are ready to do and what they are not going to do.

I always get nervous if people are unwilling to make a director’s list at all. That means they are not thinking about actually making the movie. They are only thinking about this stuff on the page.

**Craig:** Well, and this is a conversation that is useful to have at the very beginning of a relationship with a producer. Obviously they are interested in something, and the fact that they were attracted to it means other people will be attracted to it before a single thing has been changed, and a single asterisk is put on the page.

So it is important to say, “Okay, look. You have things that you feel need to be done for this to be ‘ready.’ Let’s have a discussion about what those things are right now. And let us memorialize this discussion, because I don’t want to enter into Vietnam. I really do want to make this script better.”

And if they have ideas and it is so important to listen with an open mind to anyone, if their ideas have great value and will make the script better, and are of the sort that you would think, “Oh god, I would hate to send the script out without addressing that suggestion.” Then do them. But, by laying the table at the start and saying this is what we are going to do, and that is what you feel is necessary, you won’t end up in this wandering mission creep, which is the worst feeling.

And now, I think, it has happened to me at least twice or three times where I can smell it coming from a mile away, and I just don’t go down that path.

**John:** Yeah, there are producers who I will not work with or for because I know that it is going to be that situation; or that you are going to have spent months on a project, then they will go into the room and they will have broken the whole thing down into cards again.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And there is nothing more dispiriting than that. Like, “No, no, you have a full screenplay; you don’t need to go back down to index cards again.”

**Craig:** Everybody’s anxiety needs to be respected. And everybody’s anxiety needs to be indulged to a point, but then if the process becomes about this other person’s anxiety, it’s just destructive and counterproductive. And they are supposed to be producers, not counter-producers, so best to avoid.

**John:** The one person who gets a bit of a pass is the director who has just now come onto a project. Because what I have realized as I have sat down with directors who are coming into something that I have been working on for six months, eight months, and they have been on it for six days, is they are figuring out how to make the movie. And they are figuring out what the movie it is to them. So you have to be patient and let them explore what the movie is. And sometimes they will be trying to change things that they shouldn’t be trying to change, but they are trying to figure out how they are actually going to make the movie. And they don’t really know how the movie works. And so it may be a process where you are like literally just sitting down and flipping a page, and flipping a page, and talking them through how this movie works so that they understand what it is that you did so that if they are going to do something different they understand what the ramifications of that is.

But, at a certain point if they are not going to direct the movie you have to get them off the movie so someone else can direct the movie. And some movies become saddled with a director who is attached to five different things, and that is not helping anybody either.

**Craig:** No. Then it’s just like having another producer. I mean, I love working with directors when I know we are making the movie. I do that with Todd Phillips. I just did with Seth Gordon. And I feel like, “Okay, now we are really progressing towards a start date.” Everybody has enormous interest on resolution as opposed to kind of a wandering process.

But I do know — you essentially pointed this out — that if I come in and I am asked to rewrite a script, a lot of times I have to absorb it and run it through my own head and spit it back out to do my job. There are going to be times when by the second draft I go, “You know what? The stuff that was before me was better than what I just did. But I needed to do it to get there.” And so I give the director the same latitude, because sometimes they will come around and say, “You know what? I get it now why you had it that way I just needed to arrive there naturally on my own so when the day came I understood what I was doing and I felt married to the material myself internally.”

Because we write a script, and in our minds we see everything. They read a script — it’s just words. And they are trying to build it fresh. So you have to let them build it.

**John:** You have to remember that as the screenwriter you are the only person who has already seen the movie.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** One thing I will say if you are in a situation where you have had a director on board who has gone through multiple drafts, and you are replacing that director, and suddenly there is an opportunity to get a new director on board: Take a few days and make a “best of” draft, because probably the best version of the script is not the one that he left. It is some new version that incorporates the best of those ideas, and the best of what was there before. And I found often those “best of” drafts are really genuine progress, because it is all the stuff you learned with that director and all the stuff that was better before that director came on board.

**Craig:** Yeah. I happily haven’t faced that too frequently.

**John:** I’ve faced it too frequently. [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Next question. Clint asks, “I got notes back on a screenplay I wrote with a partner. One common criticism beyond ‘we are sick of zombies/zombies suck’ is that we introduce too many characters in the first two pages. The screenplay opens with a parade scene as a number of people march off to fight in the crusade. We were aware that naming so many people at the beginning might be an issue, but our rationale was that seeing it onscreen would be easier to follow, though reading it on page might be a little confusing.

“As the camera lingers for a few seconds on each person, if you were to think, ‘Okay, this person may be important later on.’ How would a more artful writer…” An artful writer.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** “…handle such a scene?”

**Craig:** Hmm. How many characters are we talking about? Five? Ten?

**John:** He doesn’t say.

**Craig:** A little tricky. What would you do?

**John:** I would establish the parade, but I wouldn’t try to name the individual characters. And even if you know sort of who those people are who are going to be in the scene, for the first — just for the read — you cannot break those people out because the reader has limited buffers for holding character’s names, and holding character details. And you can’t shoot too many of us all at once.

You have to be very selective. And you have to be able to give enough meat to who that person is so that we can remember them. If you are introducing a character’s name as part of a parade, we are not going to be able to see them do anything that is going to help us remember who they are, or what their name is, or what was different about them than all of the other people who marching along in uniform.

So I say you have maybe two people you can single out, maybe three, but don’t try to do more than that.

**Craig:** Yeah. My suggestion is don’t introduce your characters in a parade scene. It seems like a really weird way to introduce characters. Introducing characters is such an important thing to do. The first time we see somebody tells us so much about the intention of the storyteller.

And to just see them walking along seems a little odd. Maybe if you wanted to zero in on one of them, you could do that. Sort of see 100 men marching in unison. All of them are alike, but the camera finds so-and-so. If I were directing I am not sure I would sort of introduce characters in that way. It almost seems sort of like an old TV movie style way of introducing people under credits or something like that. I just think it is a bad idea for introductions.

**John:** If you have like the one soldier who is trying to get his boot on and can’t get his boot on, and is having to race to catch up with the rest of the group, if you have the other soldier who like falls out of step with everybody else, or the… — Honestly, it’s the one who doesn’t fit in with everybody else is the one we are going to remember. And that’s a crucial thing, too.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** If you were the kind of movie that had a voice over, then you might be able to land some specific details on individual people as we are panning across them. But just the camera slowing down and giving us a little bit of a linger on them is not going to help us that much, particularly if the guys, presumably if it is the crusade, the guys are going to kind of look the same anyway. So we are going to have a hard time knowing anything special about those people.

**Craig:** Yeah. The whole point of a parade is that it is a leveler. And one must presume that you are not going to have your cast of eight characters, or even if it is five characters, that they are going to be Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise. It’s going to be people that we might not now as actors, at which point we will just see guys.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Or girls. So, I think the problem is frankly the way you are introducing your characters is a problem.

**John:** Introduce your characters with some specific details, both things that are for the reader and things that are going to be for the audience. So, they are doing something, they are saying something, they are establishing themselves as being worthy of specific attention in this whole world.

You know, it’s a grocery store, and you have clerks and you have customers. Well, that’s great, but be specific about who this one person is and why we are seeing them at this particular moment versus any other point during that day.

**Craig:** Yeah. The whole point is that you are instructing the audience to notice something. Therefore it must be notable, especially when you are introducing a character, and that point of introduction has to be pregnant with specificity and intention. People just marching is not specific or intentional. So you have to really think about that.

**John:** Really the writer is creating the spotlight. If this were on a stage you would shine a direct spotlight on that person, and that would say that this person is important. This is who we are going to pay attention to right now.

You have to create in writing a spotlight that is going to shine on them for that moment, so you know out of all the people who live in Animal House, this is the one we are going to pay attention to right now.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s why in ensemble movies you usually meet people sequentially, not at the same time. You meet somebody here, then you meet somebody here, then you meet somebody here. You see it in comedies all the time. Like the kind of the big institutional comedies that were around a lot in the ’80s, say like Police Academy, for instance.

**John:** Or Revenge of the Nerds.

**Craig:** Yeah. You would sort of get little vignettes where you would meet this person, learn something about them. Then you would go to a new place, meet them, learn something about them. And frankly, even though it seems hokey, in big ensemble dramas it usually works that way as well. It is just done somewhat more elegantly and with less goofiness.

But you don’t want to introduce people in a bland way, in a crowd. It’s weird.

**John:** And if for some reason you did need to establish that there was a crowd and they were in this crowd, you don’t have to single them out the first time they are in this crowd. Like let’s say you are at a concert, and everyone is at this concert; they are in the crowd of this concert. Just give us the crowd and then give us the individuals in a smaller situation, a smaller grouping, so that we can actually pay attention to them. Don’t try to introduce them as part of the giant…

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Don’t introduce important characters in a wide shot.

**Craig:** This is a good question because it sort of goes to a simple truth. If something is hard to understand or follow on the page, it will likely be hard to understand and follow in the movie. It is not something you fix with formatting or tricks. It is something you actually fix with writing, if that makes sense.

**John:** It does. Third question. Jim writes, “My writing partner and I just did far better than we could have expected or hoped to at a script contest.” Well, congrats Jim.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** “We entered our first ever spec on a whim, just hoping for constructive criticism, but managed a place. We were shocked but ecstatic. The prize package included an email query blast that along with our own queries landed us some reads that have also pleasantly surprised us. That’s the good news.

“The less good news is we seem to be getting more interest from production companies than we are from management entities or agents. And when the production companies find out that we don’t have representation, the general response is, ‘We are interested, but we will need you to submit something through the proper channels for legal reason.’ And while I understand that completely, it’s still immeasurably frustrating.

“We are jammed in the middle of a Catch 22.” Eh, and a mixed metaphor. [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** “Until we find reps, we are human risks, and our specs are radioactive from a legal standpoint. I have no idea what we are supposed to do now.”

**Craig:** I mean, maybe I am just naïve, but if the production companies are interested in the material, and have already looked at some amount of it that makes them interested, wouldn’t the natural response to their objection be, “Great. Do you work with managers or agents that you like, that you are fond of, that you could make an introduction so that we can then submit it to you so you can benefit from the work we have done?”

**John:** So you are suggesting that Jim write back to the production company…

**Craig:** Yeah. Great.

**John:** Great. I hope that would work. I can already hear a lot of listeners saying, “That doesn’t actually work. They won’t actually do that.”

**Craig:** If it doesn’t work, and they literally won’t take the time to email a manager or producer or agent and say, “Listen, we are interested in this script where we can’t accept it. Would you be interested in hip-pocketing these people or taking a look at it,” then really they are not interested. If you want to read something, if you are interested in material and you are not willing to do that, you are not really interested and this is a polite rejection.

**John:** It’s very possible that a lot of what we are seeing here is a polite rejection. I would say that even — let’s back up and say the reason why people have the blanket policy, like “we don’t accept submissions from unrepresented writers” is because they are worried about crazy people suing them, or crazy people just becoming a nightmare problem.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that is kind of fair and reasonable. But what will sometimes happen is the company itself won’t accept the stuff, but if there is a junior exec at that company who really wants to read something, he will just ask for it on his own and he will read it on his own. And then he will look like a hero if he finds something that’s great.

So, I would say that’s a possibility as well. The other thing I think is sort of new in this new age is if you have a great script that has won this attention, I would put the first 30 pages up online so people can read it. And that is sort of a zero-risk way for someone to just take a look through something. And if they don’t like it, they don’t like it. If they want to read more, they will ask for more, and that’s great, too.

Famously, I think Diablo Cody was found in that kind of way. She was found through her online writing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** There’s other ways more so than ever that you can get that to happen.

**Craig:** Yes. The famous Robotard 8000 did that as well. And that was in fact…

**John:** Tell us more about the Robotard, because I don’t even know the full back story on Robotard.

**Craig:** The Robotard 8000 is either a dangerous psychotic robot that writes some of the most disturbing screenplay material known to man, or is two gentlemen [laughs] who write under the pseudonym the “Robotard 8000,” and who are working screenwriters and work both in features and in television.

They showed me this script they wrote called Balls Out and I thought it was hysterical, and smart, and inspired, and absolutely unproduceable and unpurchaseable for a thousand reasons. And I told them, “Put it online.” And they said, “Why would we put it online? Because then people can steal it, and they will…”

I’m like, “It’s never going to get made. It doesn’t matter. You put it online because it is going to get noticed and you will be hired. No one is going to make this movie anyway.” [laughs]

And I feel, by the way, it’s funny — I feel that way about most specs because of the way Hollywood works right now. They are so disinclined to make original material, particularly the sort of original material that a lot of people do spec. But what they are always looking for are writers who can write the stuff they want to produce. So specs almost become like a sample industry as opposed to what it used to be in the ’80s and ’90s which was a selling industry.

So, you are absolutely right. You put the 30 pages up. And I know everyone is going to say, “What if my idea is stolen?!” which is the… — If you say, “What if my idea is stolen?” just understand you might as well say, “I’m an amateur.” That is the mating cry of the amateur. “What if my idea is stolen?”

Ideas aren’t ownable anyway. They are not property. It doesn’t matter. Forget about it. So, put your 30 pages up. It is the writing that matters. It’s your expression. It’s your voice, it’s not the idea.

If it is a great idea, hopefully they will buy it anyway. But, I love that idea of putting 30 pages up, or the whole damn thing, by the way.

**John:** Or the whole damn thing, honestly. There’s very little cost to it. And that way… — These people have these rules about not accepting unsolicited material because they just don’t want that stuff showing up in their mailbox, and then all the follow-up calls, and all the other craziness.

If it is something where it is just a link, they can click on it. They can not click on it. Nobody really knows if they clicked on it. They can read ten pages while they are on a boring conference call. And if they like it, well they will read the whole thing. Or if it is only 30 pages that you are putting up online, they will ask for the whole thing, and that’s great.

**Craig:** Yeah. And just, you know what, register it with the US Copyright Office. When you put it online, you are protected. It’s yours. You still have the copyright. Anyone can steal your “idea” because it is not stealing. It’s not yours. Ideas are not possessable. But no one can steal your unique expression in fixed form.

So, you are protected from everybody. So put it out of your mind and get your career going.

**John:** Back when Craig and I were starting, scripts were still a physical thing. It was still 120 pages, and it was actually a significant expense to make a copy of a script. Either you were working some place where you could use their Xerox machine, or there was one place that was on San Vicente and Pico that had really cheap script copying.

So you would borrow somebody’s script, and then you would make a copy and then give it back to them.

**Craig:** I remember that.

**John:** It was still a very physical kind of thing. And there was that paranoia of like, oh, scripts were kind of a currency, “I will trade you this, I will trade you that,” because actually it had some literal value because you actually had to spend some money to make them.

And there was always that question of: how much do you let other people see your stuff, or not see your stuff? Well, you don’t show stuff that is not ready to be seen by people. If it is really just, you know, if it is something you are still working on, that’s great. But at a certain point you just have to give up and give it to the world and hope it lands on the right desks.

And at the best points of my career I had no idea who was actually reading my stuff. And someone said, “Oh, I read that thing.” And I had no idea that that thing was circulating, but, “Good, I’m glad you enjoyed that thing.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And now that it is all digital that’s even easier. And if I were in these people’s position, I would have taken those first things I wrote and put them up and let people see them if they wanted to see them.

**Craig:** Absolutely. That’s great advice. And by the way, what was going on with the Spanish in the beginning. Was there really a problem? Did we really have the Spanish switched on? I was talking in English. I don’t know what you were doing.

**John:** No, I just found a great intro that happened to be in Spanish for this podcast. And so I figured, oh, that’s going to be in Spanish, so let’s just start the podcast in Spanish.

**Craig:** I like it. By the way…

**John:** I may cut this explanation out, so just to not spoil the joke.

**Craig:** Oh, yes, but the joke has already happened so I’m okay.

**John:** The joke’s already happened.

**Craig:** I believe in like the Penn & Teller school of magic. Do a trick, ooh, aah, and then explain it because it’s fun.

**John:** Yes, this trick is done with wires.

**Craig:** Ah, wires. And surely we have some Spanish speaking podcast listeners among the…how many people listening to this, John?

**John:** I think it was half a million. No, it wasn’t half a million.

**Craig:** But it was close.

**John:** It was a big number.

**Craig:** Are we allowed to say it?

**John:** I don’t know that we should say it. I think we are allowed to say it. There’s no rules.

**Craig:** It’s just weird if we say it?

**John:** I think it’s just weird if we say it. Because to me, right now, we can go, “Wow, that’s a huge number.”

**Craig:** Huge.

**John:** But then someone is going to say, “Well, the Nerdist podcast has five times that, or 50 times the listenership.”

**Craig:** This doesn’t make me feel bad. I’m amazed that anybody listens to this. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** So, if the number is bigger than 10 people, I’m just so impressed.

**John:** Yeah. I’m still pretending that my mom doesn’t listen to it, but I think she probably does.

**Craig:** Your mom listens to it?

**John:** Yeah, because it is on the website, so she doesn’t need any special software or anything to listen to it.

**Craig:** Hey, I have a question then about your mom.

**John:** Mm-hmm?

**Craig:** I’ve noticed, because obviously I want your mom to listen to a clean podcast, and I did check finally the iTunes listing of our podcast. Some of them are listed “clean” but a bunch aren’t. But I don’t think we are not clean.

**John:** So, it turns out the clean or not clean thing is a tick box we set when we are submitting the actual episode. They don’t check themselves. And so sometimes Stuart forgets to check it. So, again, it’s a Stuart problem.

**Craig:** Oh Stuart!

**John:** So I feel, and this is a valid thing to discuss: You and I decided that we were going to be a clean podcast, and that we would refrain from using the big words.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Just because we didn’t need them.

**Craig:** And because we are both Mormons.

**John:** Well that secretly, too. That’s a big factor.

**Craig:** Not a secret anymore.

**John:** Also, I have noticed that most podcasts, most technology podcasts end up talking about cars at some point. So I just bought a new car, so maybe close on a car topic. We just bought the Nissan Leaf. It’s great.

**Craig:** I have on pre-order the Tesla Model S.

**John:** Well this is going to be a great conversation because Tesla Model S people seem to love it as an idea. Here’s the reason why I am concerned about the Tesla.

**Craig:** Tell me.

**John:** That the company could go bankrupt in five years and then how are you going to check the car?

**Craig:** You can’t. That is an acknowledged roll of the dice. But, the one nice thing about Tesla compared to some of the other smaller independent electric companies like Fisker for instance, is that Tesla — and they don’t pay me, I swear — but Tesla sells their battery technology to Toyota, and I think maybe to Mercedes. So they actually have a revenue stream apart from the manufacture of their cars.

You’re right. I don’t even know if I am ever going to get this car. I put a $5,000 deposit down on it, and it is actually technically refundable unless the company goes belly up. But, I don’t know if I’ll ever get the car. I’m hoping I get the car. It seems like I will get the car.

And then, yes, I don’t know if the company will be around to fix it in five years. And it could just be a brick. But, I’m super excited about it anyway. I just feel that it is the only all-electric car I have looked at where I thought, “I like the way that car looks and I like the functionality they built into it.” It’s pretty amazing.

**John:** That’s great. I test drove the Leaf for a week before I went to New York for a month, and then it made no sense to buy the car right before going to New York. But now that I’m back, it’s good.

And you have to, at this point, plan a family — you have to have a family strategy for which car is going to be electric-only and which car can go a longer distance, which is basically the zombie apocalypse problem. What if you need to drive further than 100 miles from your house? You want a car that can go the distance.

**Craig:** Well, maybe you should get a Tesla Model S, because the Tesla Model S, the long extension model, goes 300 miles.

**John:** That’s a very long way.

**Craig:** 300 miles. Now, that’s probably 300 under optimal conditions, so let’s just knock it down and say it’s 250. I never drive 250 miles in a day. I mean, the only time I have ever done anything like that in years has been to go to Vegas, but I wouldn’t — all right, fine, I don’t take that car to Vegas. Although they actually do have a charging station, I think, in Barstow. So maybe I could do it.

**John:** Yeah. My range is 70 miles is optimal.

**Craig:** 70. Pah!

**John:** Which I very, very, very rarely would go further than. But on trips to LEGOLAND, that would be too far. So you have to have a car that can go to LEGOLAND.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** That’s as far as we will ever go.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that for the typical LA local driver, the Nissan Leaf makes a lot of sense. I just don’t like the way it looks.

**John:** I love the way it looks. It’s like a bizarre little bug.

**Craig:** Yeah, no, not for me. But that Model S…

Dude, put a link on.

**John:** I will put a link to both cars on so you can see.

**Craig:** So beautiful. It’s just really a beautiful looking car. I am not a paid promoter.

**John:** But you are willing to become a paid promoter if they were to offer you a bump up in the line?

**Craig:** I’m not saying no. [laughs]

**John:** All right, thank you, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** Have a good week. Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/professional-screenwriting-and-why-no-one-really-breaks-in).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

**Craig Mazin:** I am Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Scriptnotes. This is a podcast about screenwriting, and things that are interesting to screenwriters. How are you, Craig?

**Craig:** I’m good. How are you doing, John?

**John:** I’m doing really well. It’s a beautiful spring day in Los Angeles.

**Craig:** It’s a beautiful spring day here. Wherever Joe Eszterhas is it’s probably not such a great spot to be. [laughs]

**John:** Oh, okay, so we’ve got to link to this. This is crazy.

**Craig:** Crazy-balls!

**John:** So the back story on this, Joe Eszterhas is/was, really kind of put him in the past tense, he was a very prominent screenwriter for a period of time. He wrote things like Basic Instinct and Fatal Attraction. Movies I quite enjoy actually, Fatal Attraction especially. And was known for selling big spec scripts and being like a big oversized personality and a sort of a blowhard. Is that fair to say?

**Craig:** Yeah. He was, when you and I broke into the business, Joe Eszterhas was the superstar screenwriter. He was kind of the most famous screenwriter I would say.

**John:** He’s the only screenwriter that a person of popular culture might have heard of who was not famous for being a director, or famous for being an actor as well.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** He also wrote Showgirls, which is just a monumental achievement.

**Craig:** Heh.

**John:** Showgirls, which was so great that even as a spec script, a friend of mine got it and we held a staged reading of Showgirls — like before it was even in production, because it was just so amazing.

**Craig:** It’s pretty spectacular. But at the top, I mean, he did write some…Jagged Edge, I think, was Joe Eszterhas.

**John:** Oh, Jagged Edge, come on. Jagged Edge is great.

**Craig:** Yeah. There was a time when Joe Eszterhas was writing really good, interesting thrillers. And then they started sort of diving more towards like Sliver, and then suddenly… — Well, he very famously wrote a movie called, I think it was Burn Hollywood Burn, about a director who takes his name off a movie that then became called An Alan Smithee Film. And then the actual director took his name off the movie, so it was An Alan Smithee Film actually directed by Alan Smithee.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It was kind of a crazy story. And sort of dropped off the face of the planet, and left town, and left the business.

**John:** I think he moved up north, and then he moved out of the state, and he did other stuff. And that’s fine. People’s careers go through ups and downs and flows, and whatever.

So, the interesting new development was that a year ago, or more than a year ago, he signed on to write a movie for Mel Gibson about a famous historical event, the Maccabees. Am I pronouncing it right?

**Craig:** You are. The Maccabees. Yes.

**John:** Which was a famous Jewish event of the — I’m going to completely mess up what it actually was about, because I don’t really know what it’s about.

**Craig:** The Maccabees were, it is sort of connected to the Hanukkah story which is a fairly minor story in the Jewish tradition, but the reason Jewish people like to talk about the Maccabees is because they were warriors, and we don’t have many of those. So, it’s like famous Jewish sports legends and famous Jewish soldiers, but the Maccabees were tough guys and were Jewish warriors. It was sort of like a Jewish Braveheart king of story. So it would make sense that Mel Gibson would take that on.

And, obviously, Mel has had some issues [laughs] where he had said some anti-Semitic things, and some racist things, and some homophobic things, and, you know, pick ’em.

**John:** So it was an interesting combination of…

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** …screenwriter and director-actor. And you could sort of anticipate that things would not go well. Either it was going to be brilliant, and it was going to be the coming back of both of these talents, or it was going to end in tears.

And it ended in tears. It ended in like angry accusations…

**Craig:** Super angry.

**John:** And long letters. And so we will link to the letters that, I think, The Wrap published yesterday…

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** …about what actually transpired. And so Joe Eszterhas wrote this long letter to Mel Gibson or his production company saying, “These are all the ways you did me wrong. And these were all the crazy incidents that happened while I was writing this script for you.”

And Mel Gibson replied back in a shorter way, in a calmer way, saying, “Well, you fabricated most of these. And the script was terrible. And we would never make that movie.”

**Craig:** Here’s my question. I mean, people will read this and see for themselves, but just from a screenwriter point of view, what’s the upside for Joe Eszterhas? I don’t get it. I mean, here are it seems like the facts that both Joe Eszterhas and Mel Gibson agree on: Joe Eszterhas went off, wrote a script, turned it in, and no one liked it at all.

So, what’s the upside? I mean, he writes this letter, and it is fascinating that it includes things that you would expect from a first-time writer, not from somebody of Joe Eszterhas’ stature or former stature. Things like, “Well I should it to my friends and they loved it.” What?! [laughs] Really dude?! I mean, come on.

**John:** “They all told me it was a movie that had to be made.”

**Craig:** Right. I mean, are you really that delusional? You have now put yourself in the same category as the weirdo who is rejected on American Idol and insists that their friends and their moms say that they sing beautifully. I mean, come one. Listen, there’s no shame in whiffing.

I mean, and also, in addition to the alleged whiff, and we don’t know; maybe it’s a great script. Who knows? But in addition to the alleged whiff, he apparently turned in the script like two years later, something like that, which is obviously a no-no. I mean, I like at these guys where it says things like, “Well you went away for 15 months,” according to Mel Gibson, “you went away for 15 months, you came back, and you didn’t have a script written.”

And I think, 15 months? For my entire career, it’s always been an argument to get to ten weeks. They want it in six weeks, I end up doing it in eight weeks. Where are these people that get 15 months? Have you ever gotten 15 months to write a script?

**John:** No. I have taken 15 months, but that was a weird situation, sort of like the same studio put other work in front of it. Like Big Fish took me two years, but they kept putting stuff in front of it, so I couldn’t really get started on it.

**Craig:** Then Big Fish didn’t take you two years.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** It took you the time it took you, and then they made you work on other things. And that’s different. But each of those things took an appropriate amount of time and, listen, people work at different paces. I get that. And I don’t think of myself as fast or slow. I’m probably very average. But, 15 months is kind of astonishing.

And then to show up, and to also.. — If I were on month nine and I didn’t have anything yet, I would probably call someone and say, “I’m going to need a little extra time.” I’m not going to show up after a year and a half or whatever and go, “Uh, sorry, I don’t have it…”

**John:** And also to look at it, like Joe Eszterhas, he clearly is fairly prolific because he was able to write this, I don’t know, it was a 12-page letter.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And by the way, the 12 most entertaining pages I have read in a very long time. I want to option the letter and make the movie of the events that supposedly transpired. I don’t necessarily believe these events actually happened, but if they did happen, it’s crazy.

**Craig:** I’m with you, by the way. Look, you and I are both members of groups, identity groups, that Mel Gibson has publicly besmirched. And yet I read this and I think: There is no, absolutely no way that Mel Gibson called Jews “Oven Dodgers.” I don’t buy it for a second. I just don’t believe it. Why would he do…I mean, I understand why somebody would do that initially, but if you have already been caught and humiliated publicly in this huge horrifying way, would you really keep doing that?

Something doesn’t add up.

**John:** Yeah. What also doesn’t add up is that basically every paragraph… — The two paragraphs will describe some horrible incident that took place. And then the next paragraph starts with like, “But then I came to visit you in Malibu and we stayed the night there.

**Craig:** Right! [laughs]

**John:** And so like, what, you are the abused wife that keeps coming back to the husband?

**Craig:** And that was Mel Gibson’s point. “If I really were the person that you purport me to be, why were you on this project for two years? Why didn’t you just immediately leave?” I mean, and that is a great point. I wouldn’t sit in a room with somebody who called Jews “Oven Dodgers.” [laughs]

By the way, “Oven Dodger,” I have to say as a collector of racist slurs, that’s a new one on me. It doesn’t even really make sense.

**John:** It doesn’t make sense.

**Craig:** Yeah. “Oven Magnets” is what I would call Jews.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** I mean, “Oven Dodgers?” Which oven did we dodge? I think we hit them all.

**John:** Didn’t Eszterhas… — Well he’s not old enough to have gone through the Holocaust. Or maybe his family did.

**Craig:** Well, he himself is Christian. I think the deal is maybe that his wife is Jewish and he got really into Judaism or something, which is nice, but…

**John:** Fair and lovely.

**Craig:** Yeah, but… — And listen, everyone has a right to be offended by hateful speech. You don’t have to be a member of the particular group that is being slurred, but “Oven Dodgers,” I’m just questioning the logic of the slur, [laughs] because as far as I could tell, Jews didn’t miss many ovens from 1941 to 1945.

**John:** The other thing which I adored about this letter is that it is actually clearly typed in like Word and then just printed on a normal printer. And, like, who prints letters anymore? So he actually had to write this thing, print it, fold it up, put it in an envelope, and send it to somebody. Because what was published wasn’t a fax; it was a scan of an actual real thing.

**Craig:** I think you have uncovered yet one more piece of evidence that Joe Eszterhas is stuck in the ’90s. But, I mean…

**John:** I was reading this last night and thinking, “When was the last time I physically wrote a letter, like typed up a letter in word, and printed it and mailed it?” You just don’t do that anymore.

**Craig:** Only if a governmental agency requires it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It is bizarre. But I guess underneath all of the drama and stupidity of it all, I’m just sort of questioning the screenwriter sense of it. I just don’t get…What were you hoping to achieve with this letter? That he would read it and go, “Oh, your friends love it? Hmm, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Warner Brothers is wrong. Maybe this is a great script and I just didn’t realize. And I’m going to shoot it.”

What’s the strategy? I don’t get it.

**John:** I don’t get it either.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** It does also point out what we frequently talk about on the program, that screenwriting is the craft of pushing words around on the papers, and that is a crucial part of it. But a lot of career screenwriting is the ability to get along with other people. And this seems like a classic example of two people who could not possibly get along with each other. Trying and failing to get along with each other. And that is the doom. That’s where it goes awry; it’s the combination of ingredients.

**Craig:** Well, they have worked together before, I think, right?

**John:** Did they? I don’t remember.

**Craig:** In the back of my head I seem to think that they had worked together on something. In fact, in a weird way I thought, okay, I understand if Mel Gibson feels like, “Alright. I’m kind of a persona non grata right now in Hollywood because of the things I said, and maybe what I should do is find somebody I had a relationship with that preexisted all of this brouhaha, because it is a little weird for me to sit in a room with a new person who brings the baggage of all these events, and doesn’t have any pretext. So maybe I will go find Joe Eszterhas.”

I mean, in theory it’s an interesting idea, but it’s kind of… — The whole thing is ugly.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. And makes me sympathetic to Mel Gibson.

**John:** Yeah. And it is a weird upshot of it all is that by releasing a short statement saying, “That’s crazy, Joe,” he actually seems like the more sane person.

**Craig:** He is the more sane person. [laughs] There’s no question.

**John:** So, you should work with people who are visibly more crazy than you are, and therefore you will seem like, “Oh, he’s reasonable at least.” It’s actually very much a Survivor strategy; you keep around the people who are like so off the wall nuts that no one is ever going to vote for them, and therefore you look better by comparison.

**Craig:** So, it’s sort of the “stand next to the bigger girl to look thin.” It’s the mean girls’ strategy.

**John:** Absolutely. So, let’s follow up a little bit on Amazon because on our last podcast we spoke about the new Amazon deal which is essentially they have revamped how Amazon Studios is going to be working for their screenwriting — it’s much less of a competition than it used to be before. But basically Amazon Studios is going to try to make movies, and they are now going to be — they cut a deal with the WGA so that WGA writers can be employed by Amazon.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And in talking with other screenwriters in follow up after we had our podcast, some people have come back and said, “Well, I think you are overstating what a success this is, or even if it is a success,” because other studios have done similar kinds of things, where like Dimension, for example, which is a division of Miramax, or whoever owns Dimension now.

**Craig:** Weinstein Company.

**John:** Yeah, bought and sold many times. They classically have a non-WGA signatory branch.

**Craig:** All studios do.

**John:** All studios do. So basically it is a way for them to buy things outside of WGA auspices when they have the opportunity to.

**Craig:** Well, kind of. The deal is that when studios, when entities sign these agreements they are essentially saying, “We acknowledge that if somebody is going to do the work — if we are going to employ somebody to do the work of a screenwriter, if they are a professional screenwriter then we have to it through the WGA.”

There is this weird thing about being a professional. And how you define professional — it’s in the MBA. There is some actual definition. So, Warner Brothers can hire somebody non-union to write a script if they are not a “professional” screenwriter. Now, in practice, that rarely happens. For instance, when I wrote my first screenplay, I had to join the Guild. It’s actually a fuzzy thing. I should really ask them and figure out how this all works, like what the deal is with that.

**John:** What I think the Amazon deal, and sort of the blowback about what the deal actually encompasses, and who gets covered and who doesn’t get covered, it comes down to from my point of view the difference between literary material and professional screenwriting. And Amazon Studios, as it was classically set up was really designed to just filter and find literary material. So, it wasn’t so much set up for, like, “We are going to employ these writers to do this work.” It was, “If someone wrote a great screenplay, we could find that great screenplay. And we are going to bypass the whole system by finding these great screenplays that no one else has found.”

That didn’t really work out very well for them. So now they may have some scripts that are kind of good ideas, or kind of interesting, but they actually need to do the work of giving those scripts to a place where they could shoot them. And that is going to involve professional writing. And that professional writing is now going to be largely covered by the WGA.

**Craig:** It seems like it, yeah. But I think that there is a reasonable question to ask; for people who are new, who are not professional screenwriters, who have written a screenplay in their home in Wichita, if they send it to Amazon, my understanding is that if Amazon buys it, it would be a WGA deal?

**John:** Yeah. I haven’t seen confirmation on that. So, I think it is going to be interesting to figure out how that is actually going to work in practice. If it is a spec script that somebody wrote who is not WGA covered, Amazon buys it, is that the kind of thing that is going to kick that person into the Guild?

It doesn’t necessarily have to be, because Amazon could theoretically be buying it through their non-signatory arm, but at the moment that they try to employ a WGA writer on it, that script becomes a WGA property. A WGA-covered property.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** That is not necessarily going to pull that original writer in.

**Craig:** Right. That is the deal. It’s like, okay, the first screenplay I ever wrote, I wasn’t a professional screenwriter. I was a guy. But the studio that bought it, in that case Disney, understood that at some point they might want a WGA writer writing on it, therefore they had to buy it under the WGA deal. Therefore, I had to join the Guild.

And I suppose that that is sort of the idea at Amazon. It’s like, you can hire a guy to write the script, but if you ever want to hire a WGA writer to rewrite it, you need to do the whole thing under the Guild. I think.

**John:** We’ll see how it works out.

**Craig:** We’ll dig into this and report back.

**John:** So, our first question of the day actually is a follow up on this. “Craig’s comment during the discussion on the new Amazon Studio deal was just utterly stupid.”

**Craig:** Hm.

**John:** And this is from Jock. Jock can say you are utterly stupid.

**Craig:** I agree.

**John:** Should I cut that part out?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** We’ll just leave that there.

**Craig:** John, I’m so used to it. [laughs] By the way, utterly stupid is one of the most mild things anyone on the Internet has said about me. So, I haven’t even been touched…

**John:** That’s fair. Stupid? Fine.

**Craig:** What’s his name?

**John:** Jock.

**Craig:** Jock.

**John:** I think that’s his real name. This really is his first name.

**Craig:** Not a chance. Jock? His parents didn’t name him Jock.

**John:** Yeah, but maybe he goes by Jock. I think your name is whatever you choose to call yourself.

**Craig:** That’s utterly stupid. [laughs]

**John:** Thank you for pointing that out, my belief in self-naming rights. [laughs] I’m like a stadium and I choose to name myself.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** “Of course there is something between being a full-on professional and nothing.” So he is criticizing your point about either you are professional screenwriter or you are not.

**Craig:** Oh, okay.

**John:** “In the same way that lots of people have one novel in them and no more, either because they are out of ideas, or because the process no longer interests them after all that, lots of people have one screenplay in them. The number one should not be taken literally. Maybe it’s two, maybe it’s four. Regardless, it is a smallish number. Maybe they have exactly no interest in dealing with the insane Byzantine world of the Hollywood system? You two live…” “you two” being you and me.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** “…live inside a world in which the studio system makes sense, where people are either screenwriters, or they aren’t. But the simple truth is, that isn’t how the world really works. It’s just how your world works.”

**Craig:** Oh! It’s not? [laughs] Oh my god. My mind is blown. Keep going.

**John:** That’s the end of the edited question.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s it? That’s not how the world works. Dot. Dot. Dot. It’s like a Flash Gordon episode. Will he survive?

**John:** [laughs] Craig just made a TV reference, so I think people have to finish their drink.

**Craig:** Well, but it’s a TV reference from 1952.

**John:** I thought you were referring to the new TV Flash Gordon.

**Craig:** No. No, no, no. God no. I didn’t even know there was one. [laughs]. Is there really one?

**John:** Yeah, Flash Gordon. David Goyer.

**Craig:** No, not Flash Forward. Flash Gordon.

**John:** Oh, Flash Gordon. Yeah.

**Craig:** See, Flash Gordon, my dad would go to the movies in the ’50s, and in front of movies — we will get to Jock’s moronic comment in a second. I promise. But he would go to movies, and before the movie they would show a serial, and it was usually a Flash Gordon. And it always ended in a cliffhanger. So it was like a 10-minute short and he was kid, and he believed everything he saw, of course, he was really into it. And he said they would always do this thing where like two guards would lead Flash Gordon down this cave/tunnel/hallway into this big room with a lava pit. And they would take him and throw him. And he would be mid-air, falling into the lava, and then they would freeze.

And then the announcer would say, “How will Flash get out of this? Come back to the movie theater next week to find out.” Such a great cliffhanger. And then he would go back the next week excited to see how could Flash Gordon possibly escape from this. He is literally falling into lava.

And they would start up, except in starting up with him hovering over the lava, he would be walking down the hallway again, and this time they wouldn’t throw him in; he would beat them up and escape. [laughs] It was such a rip-off!

**John:** Such wonderful cheating. It’s sort of also like comic book covers where they show some scene that is supposedly from the story but has nothing really to do with the story.

**Craig:** Exactly. It’s just a total lie. But it’s a false cliffhanger. And in this case, I think Jock has provided us with a false cliffhanger.

“That’s not the way the world works.” But he is not going to tell us how the world works, presumably because he doesn’t know either. I don’t know what he is talking about. Look, you can have one script and you can have 1,000 scripts in you. I’m not talking about how many scripts you have. I’m talking about this simple question. Are you a professional screenwriter or not?

The word professional means it is your job, it’s your profession. It’s what you do to make a living. Either you is or you isn’t. It’s not that hard. I mean, I don’t get it. It’s like, if you write a screenplay, one screenplay, and you sell it, then yes, you are a professional screenwriter. If you never write a screenplay again, you have ceased to be a professional screenwriter.

It’s not like there is this magical thing that happens. It’s a little bit like Schrodinger’s cat. I mean, at some point you are kind of both, I guess, in a weird way. But there is no such thing as a half a screenwriter, or a hobbyist screenwriter. You are or you are not. That’s that.

**John:** I would say Jock is arguing that there is such a thing as a hobbyist screenwriter, as a person who loves to write screenplays, and wants to sell screenplays but doesn’t want to become a professional screenwriter.

**Craig:** That’s nonsense. [laughs]. That’s crazy.

**John:** That can be nonsense, but it doesn’t mean that Jock isn’t that person who is doing that.

**Craig:** But Jock is wasting his time, because why would you write screenplays to not sell or be employed as a screenwriter? I mean, if you are literally writing… — Screenplays are designed to be turned into movies. We are not talking about novels. You can write novels as a “hobbyist” because the point is that a novel should be read. And novels aren’t defined by any other process. You read them.

Same thing with short stories. I’m a short story hobbyist. I get that. I don’t sell my short stories. I would never try to sell my short stories. But I put one on the Internet because I thought it would be interesting for people to read. And then some of them did.

But screenplays are not to be read. They are to be turned into movies. They can’t be turned into movies if they are not bought and sold. [laughs] It’s a simple thing. I mean, is this guy for real?

**John:** I wonder if there is such a thing as like a hobbyist architect who like…

**Craig:** Right?! Exactly.

**John:** You draw…you build these amazing blueprints for things that you will never actually build. I’m sure there are those people.

**Craig:** But they are not architects. They are not.

**John:** They are not. They are pretend designers.

**Craig:** The building is the evidence of architecture. The plans are not the evidence of architecture. It’s…I am beside myself. And I’m not beside myself because he said I was “utterly stupid,” or my comment was “utterly stupid,” because I have been utterly stupid at times. I’m upset because when people say things like this, I think we are wasting our time. [laughs] That’s what I think.

How do we…that is an impossibly thick amount of granite to push through. I don’t know what to do.

**John:** And see I have been the nice guy who has agreed to speak sometimes to like a small town screenwriting society, and so you go in and you visit these people. And they are so nice. And they just love movies and they are working on their scripts. But it’s clear that many of them have no intention of every actually trying to sell the things, or how they would sell the things. They just love to write screenplays.

And I guess it’s fine. I guess if you are enjoying it, it’s like, if it is their form of poetry I don’t want to judge them in a negative way. But, it’s not…I don’t know. It’s not really screenwriting.

**Craig:** Well, we can say this for sure. If you truly want to just write screenplays for yourself for personal fulfillment for a sense of expression or achievement, I have no problem with that whatsoever. And I don’t judge you. However, you are not a professional screenwriter.

So, the whole point of his premise is that there is something in between professional and non-professional. And he is wrong. He is just a non-professional screenwriter. [laughs]

I think that there is this other thing of like, “Well you guys are from the studio system and we’re not; we have these other things that we are doing, like I’m writing screenplays for YouTube or something like that.” And then my feeling is, okay, well then if you are writing screenplays and making them into movies on YouTube, I guess in a sense you are a professional screenwriter. You are kind of, I guess. I mean, you are…are you? I don’t know. What the hell? Yeah.

**John:** Here’s what I…I think professional versus non-professional, that’s a fairly clear binary thing. Are you getting paid for it or not getting paid for it?

**Craig:** John, that’s utterly stupid. [laughs]

**John:** That’s one of the delimiting factors. And I have a whole other rant about professionalism and I feel like professionalism kind of really isn’t about being paid for it. Professionalism is about doing your best work as if you were getting paid for it; as if people are — people are going to judge you on your professionalism regardless of whether you are getting paid for it. So, professional is sort of a weird, loaded term that way.

And, yes, there are all sorts of new kinds of writing-based filmed entertainment things you could be doing. But if what we are talking about is you write 120-page screenplays and you do not attempt to sell them, or that is not your goal or aim at writing a 120-page screenplay, that’s just kind of weird, and that’s not really what we are talking about.

And so, the longer parts of what I edited out of Jock’s questions was he had been defending the original Amazon Studios deal saying it was a way in for us people who are outside of the system. And it’s like, well, I think it was a really horrible way for people outside of the system, and this is a slightly better way for people outside of the system. But, you shouldn’t be submitting it to this thing if you have no desire to ever be in the system, because it is meant to be another way into the process of making actual feature films.

**Craig:** It’s basically, and I don’t mean to get personal here, but it is a loser attitude to say, “I can’t get into the system, therefore I am going to celebrate this other thing that is a way in that has nothing to do with the system.” I wasn’t in the system. You weren’t in the system. Neither of us were born in Hollywood. Our parents didn’t do this. We wrote and then we got in the “system.”

More to the point, I don’t even like that terminology because it implies that there is some building we walked into that is bigger than us. We are the system. You and I are the screenwriting system. They go to us and say, “We need screenplays.” You know what I mean?

I feel like this guy has this kind of… — It’s this prevalent, “I can’t make it. I’m never going to make it. So how dare you people who have made it assail something that affords me a chance to make it.” It’s not making it. What they have afforded you isn’t making it. It’s a rip. Or it was a rip. And that is so important. There’s that great moment…

There’s this movie, The Late Shift, that was about the late night wars between Letterman and Leno. And there was this point where they had decided that Jay Leno would get The Tonight Show after Johnny Carson retired, and Letterman was just beside himself because he felt like it should have gone to him. And Leno is on the air, and it is not going well, and NBC comes back to Letterman quietly and says, “Hey, we screwed up. You want it?”

And he calls, I think it is Tom Lassally who was Johnny Carson’s guy.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And he says, “Should I do it?” And Tom Lassally says, “Don’t you get it? They are not offering you The Late Show? They are offering you The Late Show with Jay Leno. It’s not the same. It’s damaged goods.”

And that’s the point. They are not offering you a way in. A way into what?

**John:** This is a great segue to what I what to main topic for today which is that idea of breaking in. There is this idea out there that, and we use the term, like, “How did you break into Hollywood?” And the break-in, I think that is just completely the wrong term for what it really is.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Because it implies that there is some sort of like great heist movie that is going to be carried out. Like we have to break into the studio, and once you are on the inside then everything is different. And it’s not that way at all. And I wonder if the breaking in idea came from the fact that the actual studios sort of look like, they are little fortresses in the sense that they have walls all around them. And you are either inside of the studio or you are outside the studio.

But, in actual practice it is not like that at all. And as I have had other screenwriters write about on the blog about their first experiences, everyone is different, but the commonalities are no one ever talks about having made it. There is never that sense of like, “Now I’m inside. Now I’m really working.”

It’s like suddenly you are getting paid to write some stuff, but it is all blurry and nebulous. And there is not one moment that you are in and one moment that you are out. Joe Eszterhas didn’t realize he had fallen out of the system.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Just, he did. People stopped calling him.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So I think we may have already sort of talked about our first how we got started, but it may be worth recapping here just as a sense of how you get your first job, what your first job is like.

**Craig:** Well everybody’s story is different. I have never met any two screenwriters that had the same “how I got my first job story.” So, anytime people ask, “Well how did you break in?” I always say, “It’s kind of irrelevant to you. I will tell you if you are interested.” But the truth is everybody has a different way in. And, by the way, I totally agree with you that the language is a trap, because I will say this: You get your first job, and you start writing, if you aren’t immediately worrying about the next one, you’re nuts.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because all that is really happening, there is no on/off switch for in or out, right? There is you are being paid to write for now, and hopefully you will be paid to write quickly again. And it is essentially like anything else; it is a business of relationships, and success and failure in intervals. And so there is no in or out. People have sold scripts for huge amounts of money and then disappear. There are people who have been nominated for Academy Awards and disappear.

There are people who kind of churn away under the radar for 30 years, making a check every month. Everybody is different. It’s a very diverse business, with a lot of different ways to do this, and frankly what shocks me so much about this kind of strange resentment that has occurred, almost like a weird 99%/1% sort of resentment thing going on lately… — There was an interesting thread on Deadline where there were allegations of trust fund screenwriters or something.

**John:** Oh, yeah, I forgot. You came from a very wealthy family and that is why you are so successful.

**Craig:** Yeah. I was lumped in. It was the strangest thing. They were like, “Look at all these writers who have trust funds whose parents were rich.” And then they listed me, and I’m like, “My parents were public school teachers!” I grew up in… — My hometown in New Jersey is where Bruce Springsteen grew up. That song, My Hometown, that’s my hometown. It’s Main Street, white-washed windows, and vacant stores. That’s where I grew up.

It’s very strange. So, no, I wasn’t a trust fund baby. But, what was I saying? I can’t even remember.

**John:** A couple points, I think, were all relevant, and I think we should get back to trust fund babies.

**Craig:** Trust fund babies. Yeah.

**John:** Everyone’s story about how they got started — I like to say get started rather than breaking in — everyone’s story about how they got started as a working screenwriter is different, but the commonality I found in every story is that they wrote something that someone read and said, “This is amazing. This is great. This is better than anything I have read this week, this year. I want to make this movie, or I want to see this happen.”

So, it all started with you wrote something amazing. It wasn’t that you had a good idea for a movie. No, you wrote something that people loved. And that thing that people loved often never got made, but it was so good that people said, “Hey,” not only did they pay attention but they said, “I want to work with you on this.”

And so in my case it was the script that should never see the light of day called Here and Now. And one of my professors read it, and classmates read it, and it got me to a producer. And the producer got me to an agent, and we got it sent out. And it never sold but it got me started. And everyone has some story of something that they wrote that someone said, “This is great. I want to see this happen.”

And it wasn’t that they wrote something that was like, “That’s pretty good. That’s about like an average screenplay I’ve read.” No. Someone said, “This is better than the other stuff.”

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And so it all started with like, “You wrote something that was better than everything else there and ideally something that feels like we could make this into a movie, like I can see a way to make this into a movie.”

**Craig:** That’s key. I mean, I remember the phrase somebody used when I first started was “You can do this,” which is a big thing for them because they are constantly reading scripts where they think, “Well, there’s some interesting things here and there, but in the end I know what it’s like to write a screenplay from the outside, you know, as an employer, or producer, or studio executive. I know what my side of this is. I know the journey that the screenwriter is going to have to go through to some extent. And I don’t think they can do it. I don’t think this person can do this.”

Then you read a script and you meet the person and you think, “I do think the person can do this, and that is a big deal.” And it’s this weird kind of blink style judgment that they make that is based on the person, on the material itself. There is just kind of a vibe, like this guy gets it and this person doesn’t.

But what I was going to say before is, and it goes to your point about the material. Really, we don’t break in; we get noticed. And contrary to the current griping climate, there are more ways to get noticed now than ever before. That is why I am so astonished. It’s like, Amazon?!

The notion that you need Amazon to get you noticed is absurd. You can put a screenplay right now on the Internet. If somebody picks up… — Look at the guy who is on Reddit. The guy on Reddit who just started writing a story about marines who fell through time and landed in the Roman era — he was noticed in a way that would have never happened 20 years ago. Ever. And he is a screenwriter, and he is a professional screenwriter right now.

So, the notion that the walls are… — They are lower than they have ever been. So I don’t know what all the complaining is about.

**John:** Some people just need to complain.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And let’s talk about the trust fund baby or the nepotism, because I was aware of this when we were doing rehearsals. I brought my daughter to see rehearsals for just like a half an hour two different days. And in the back of my head I’m thinking, “Oh, wait, is this some sort of like weird, special advantage for her? Does this make her more likely to be able to have a career in the arts because she saw it?”

And, like, well yeah, kind of.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Because she got to see not the finished product, but she got to see the hard work. And I feel like a lot of times when you see people who are successful, and they come from either parents who are wealthy or parents or parents who were artists… — Like Lena Dunham whose show Girls I have to plug every podcast, her parents are both artists. And so I look at her, who at 25 is writing, directing, and starting in her own TV show, and working her butt off, I’ve got to think that is partly because she saw her parents working their butts off every day and achieving success by having worked really, really hard.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I remember when I first met Steven Spielberg and I was really intimidated by him, and he was considering directing Big Fish. And so I guess I visited him on set. And I thought, “Well, he must just be magic, because he makes these amazing movies, and so he must have some sort of magic power.” And then I saw him and realized, “Oh, no, he is actually just working really hard.” Well, I can work really hard. Oh, it’s not magic.

And, I don’t know, that’s…

**Craig:** Well, I think that for kids of… — If your parents are in the business, and I know some people who are in the business whose parents were in the business, then I can see, well, you did have the benefit of a great private tutor. My parents don’t know anything about screenwriting and certainly could not have encouraged me or helped me as I was beginning.

**John:** The Gyllenhaals, their mother is an award-winning screenwriter. Their father is a director.

**Craig:** Yeah, that makes sense. Sure. But in the end, of course, they also, they’re Gyllenhaals, they have to be really good-looking to be onscreen, and they have to actually deliver the goods, which they have.

And so the point is, it’s not enough to… — I mean, sure, you could maybe get one or two, but the notion that, and now let’s turn to screenwriters and this absurd nonsense that there is this rash of trust fund screenwriters who have the luxury of writing all day the way that no one else does, because they are sitting on mounds of family money, is insane.

I came out here, I came to Los Angeles with my Toyota Corolla SR5 Red, you can link to that. It’s a gorgeous little car, [laughs] and $1,400 that I had saved up from working. That’s it. By the time I had rented my apartment and put first, last, and security down, I was basically down to about three or four weeks of money to sort of eat and live or whatever. And I immediately started calling up temp agencies and got work as a temp employee. And then got work — my first actual salary was $20,000. And there was no cushion. There was no anything. But I was writing.

Writing is free. It’s the freest thing in the world, assuming you have… — You know what? Forget the assumption. You don’t have a computer. You don’t even have electricity. You have a pad and a pen. [laughs]

**John:** I write a first draft by hand, with a pad and a pen.

**Craig:** It’s the freest thing in the world. It’s the last thing you need luxury for. This absurd notion that writing is so tragically difficult for the fragile human state that you must spend all day, you know, I don’t know, like Byron, languishing in your tuberculosis and scrawling on a pad for minutes at a time, and then taking breaks. It’s like, what?! No! No. It’s the last job you need a trust fund for.

**John:** You know, things you need trust funds for. I think we could probably make a list. Polo. I think Polo is a kind of sport that requires some trust funds.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** It’s hard to become a professional polo player if you have no access to horses.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s right.

**John:** Or like somebody to clean your little white chaps.

**Craig:** I think yachting probably.

**John:** Yachting. Yeah. That’s pretty much that. There are very few other things.

**Craig:** I mean, no, I don’t want to come off like a guy that doesn’t acknowledge that some people are born on third base and think they hit a triple. Because, that’s true; some people are like that. They are out there. But, there is a tendency for those who are on the bench to take swipes at everyone who is at the plate. Everyone is there for the wrong reason because, obviously, if there is no unjust reason for people’s success, then there is no unjust reason for their failure.

And they need an unjust reason for their failure.

**John:** To you point about being born on third base. I would argue that every American is born on third base.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And so the difference between like me being born in middle class Boulder, Colorado versus someone being born in Alabama is pretty much meaningless in terms of a screenwriting career.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. High class problems.

**Craig:** High class problems. Look, we can look at the various inequalities that exist in the screenwriting community and debate why they are there.

**John:** And there are inequalities.

**Craig:** There are. There are inequalities.

**John:** Under-representation of women. Minority representation isn’t where it needs to be. TV has made inroads, but features — hasn’t made the same kind of inroads. Those are all meaningful things that should be looked at and should be addressed.

But to say that it is because of what people’s families were before this I don’t think is accurate.

**Craig:** Well, and then it is also unfair to start listing off writers who are white men and succeeding and accuse them of being the beneficiaries of some trust fund. That’s bizarre to me. It’s not fair. I mean, I personally don’t — if you want to take a shot at me, it’s just patently absurd because obviously I’m not from a trust fund. Everybody knows what public school teachers make.

But then there are people, like poor Jamie Vanderbilt whose name is — he’s a Vanderbilt. He’s from the Vanderbilt family. And so it is easy to go, “Oh, well that guy…”

But here’s a couple of things to point out. One, Jamie is an excellent screenwriter. Excellent, regardless of what his last name is. And, two, there are like 1,000 Vanderbilts. I mean, I know Jamie. We have talked about this Vanderbilt thing. He is like, “Yeah, I was like to the big mansion in North Carolina once, but there are a lot of Vanderbilts. I don’t really have the Vanderbilt fortune. I’m not that kind of…”

It’s just not fair. It’s not fair to diminish what he’s accomplished. It is so hard to be a screenwriter. And it disgusts me, frankly, to see people tear down screenwriters on the basis of anything other than their work. And even then I wish they would stop tearing them down on the basis of work and just be nice.

It’s a hard job. Just be nice.

**John:** Just be nice.

**Craig:** Come on!

**John:** Three quick questions that we can wrap up with.

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** First question is from Tucker. “Could you talk about the quote system for getting paid for assignments? Is it negotiable? Is it written in stone? Is it different for pitches you have sold? I’m up for a job but my quote is low. I don’t know how much wiggle room I have.”

**Craig:** Hmm. That’s a good question.

**John:** So, a quote is something that gets asked, like, “Oh, so what’s his quote?” And it is generally like what is the last you got paid for a similar job.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s right. I mean, the quote system is sort of pegged to what you are or would be paid for an original screenplay. That’s kind of how they back everything out. So you have a number. Like let’s say you sold an original screenplay for $300,000. Your agent will argue that that is your quote. Therefore your rewrite quote will be, I think, $200,000.

And it is a way of sort of benchmarking what your market value is for business affairs, because business affairs essentially goes by formulas. And their job… — These studios all understand that it is tragic when one of them increase someone’s salary, because that ripples across to all of them. And just as if I increase your salary at Fox, then Sony is going to have to pay that new number. If Sony does, it’s back to me, then I have to pay an even bigger number. They don’t like to do it.

**John:** We should say, though, it is not that Sony has to pay that big number. It is that Sony is going to feel pressure to pay that bigger number. They can choose not to pay that bigger number, and then they are just not going to hire you, or you can stand your ground. Your quote could drop because no one is willing to pay what you say you need to pay.

**Craig:** Yes. That’s true. Although when they start — when they get as far as, okay, let’s negotiate the deal, they understand already what your quote is. They don’t get into that, they don’t get to the “let’s negotiate a deal” phase in ignorance of your quote.

So, they are already aware of what they are going to roughly kind of pay. And they are dealing with fairly powerful agencies usually — CAA, UTA, WME — who leverage not only your quote and your worth as a client, but just the agency in general. So, that is roughly the quote system.

And then the deal is you get bumps, that’s the industry parlance for increases, when you get a movie green lit, if you get a movie mad, if the movie’s a hit. Stuff like that moves you up. Whiffing, not delivering the goods, that will move you down.

**John:** But we should say it is not like a D&D bonus where it is like, “Oh, your movie got this much, so your quote automatically bumps to a certain amount.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s that since the last time you were paid something, the agency can say all of these things happened, so we think he is at this level now. And we think that is the bump? You can do it as a bump for this.

**Craig:** That’s right. And that’s the art of negotiating as an agent. You kind of are playing this sort of vaporous game about what these things are worth. And there are other factors that come into play. How in demand are you? Who wants you there? Does everybody want you, including the very important director and actor? Are you a studio that tends to pay what they call Full Freight?

Some studios are sort of notorious for being discount, where they say, “Look, we are not a big studio. We make smaller budgets, but then we try and compensate you additionally when the movie comes out and succeeds.” Other studios are full freight studios; they have tons of money and they are not catching a break.

So, it’s all… — This is why agents, theoretically, get 10%. [laughs]

**John:** A question from Mario. Mario says, “I am a Canadian currently working and living in California as a game developer.” But he’s also a screenwriter. “If a studio likes your work and wants to work with you, will they sponsor a work visa to allow you to live in the US? Otherwise it seems the only solution for me if I want to work in Hollywood would be to go back to Canada which seems a bit ridiculous considering I live so close to where the action is right now.”

So I actually know something about work visas. I know some international screenwriters. You can sometimes get sponsored by a work visa. More likely what is going to happen is once they start paying you enough money, like if you sell a spec script for a certain amount of money, or you are getting paid a certain amount of money for a job, you are going to find the Hollywood immigration attorney, like the guy in Los Angeles who does this. And he is going to figure it out for you.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s one of those things that money actually does sort of solve. And it will be some weird thing where as you form a loan out corporation, that loan out corporation is going to hire you. There is going to be some magic way to do it, because it is not uncommon at all.

**Craig:** It’s not. Although it has become a little more difficult since 9/11. Immigration got a little weirder. And bizarrely it is difficult for Canadians. I remember going through this with someone that we wanted to bring in from Vancouver to LA to work on a production for us. It’s difficult. And it’s annoying actually.

But, yeah, when there’s a will there’s a way.

**John:** Yeah. And money makes it easier.

**Craig:** Money seems to make things easier.

**John:** So, if you do sell that spec script, and you want to work here, then you get started on it, and it is going to take awhile, but you will make it all work out. And it has worked out for many people, many times before.

And the fact that you are a screenwriter, it’s different than if you are a costume designer. That feels like one of those jobs where you can fairly argue that there are many costume designers here; screenwriting is a specialty career.

**Craig:** That’s right. That’s a good point. I mean, the concept behind the immigration blocking is “There are fifty unemployed costumers that are here that are citizens; we would rather that they be up for this job and not an import.” And you have to sort of justify that the imported employee is special and unique. And that is much easier to do when you are talking about art.

**John:** Yeah. And so I would say if your agent or whoever is getting you this deal, someone who works at that agency will know how to do this. And will know who the first person is that you need to call.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Last question is about animation. “Since you are both working on animated projects right now…” I forgot, are you working on something right now?

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m involved — I wrote a bit on this movie called Turkeys. And now I am involved sort of as a consulting producer.

**John:** Okay. And I’m working on Frankenweenie. So, this person is writing to ask, “I’m curious about how your deals for these projects were structured. Does the WGA have jurisdiction or is I.A.T.S.E. involved? When a WGA takes on an animation project, by whose rules are they playing? If a new writer breaks in with an animation project, can he negotiate a WGA deal?”

So, what was the deal on Turkeys? Is it I.A.T.S.E.?

**Craig:** Oh yeah. It’s I.A.T.S.E. Animation Guild 839. I don’t believe there has ever been a feature animated film that has been WGA, in part because I.A.T.S.E. Animation 839 has jurisdiction. The only WGA deals I’m aware of for animation are primetime Fox. That’s it. [laughs] I don’t know of any other ones.

**John:** The mocap, the Zemeckis mocap things are WGA-covered, and it is up in that weird gray area, are those animation or are those live action? And so far they have been counted as live action which s great.

**Craig:** Yes. And so that is the kind of gray area where the WGA has prevailed, and SAG and AFTRA and everybody has kind of tried to say, “Look, this is really, let’s call this live action, even if you are…”

It’s sort of like, “Okay, if I shoot you truly in live action, and then rotoscope you, it’s not like that is animation guild all of a sudden.” Animation is traditional. All images are drawn. Or, all images are entirely computer generated. So, if you are rolling film, or you are rolling video…

**John:** On Frankenweenie, they are shooting frames, but it’s one frame at a time.

**Craig:** Oh, they are doing stop motion?

**John:** Stop motion.

**Craig:** And is stop motion WGA or animation guild?

**John:** It ends up being moot because they have all been British productions. So I think, maybe I am covered by I.A.T.S.E., but I am pretty sure that it is just some bizarre British thing and I get a check every once and awhile.

**Craig:** I suspect that stop motion would be considered animation out here and not WGA.

**John:** I’m sure it’s considered animation.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, I mean, the real question when you sign a deal for animated work, let’s talk about feature animation because that is what I am most familiar with, it’s not a question of WGA or not. It’s a question of union or not. Because they have every option of saying, “We are doing this non-union.” And your great interest is in making sure that at the very least it is covered by Animation 839 because, and 839 is the – I.A.T.S.E. is this really big union, and then they have all of these locals which are divisions. And Animation Guild is Division 839.

Because, you will get at least pension and healthcare at a certain level. And you may not ever vest in the pension system; I doubt I will because I don’t work that frequently in animation, but there is healthcare for those of you who don’t have healthcare. And that alone — that and some minimum protections. There’s not much else, frankly, that that contract provides. There are no residuals. There’s no credit protection. Certainly no separated rights. But it’s better than nothing.

**John:** Better than a kick in the butt. So, the lack of residuals you definitely feel when you write an animated movie. Because, like Corpse Bride, that sold a lot of video copies and I don’t get a penny for video copies on that.

**Craig:** Yeah,

**John:** And that does really hurt.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah. The guys I always think of are Elliott and Rossio because Ted and Terry wrote Aladdin. Ted and Terry wrote Shrek. Not a penny in residuals from those movies. And we are talking about, god, billions in revenue.

**John:** Yeah. And it’s too bad about Pirates of the Caribbean being such a disaster and not making a cent for them. So…

**Craig:** [laughs] Oh, I can still feel a little bad.

**John:** You can feel a little bad for them.

**Craig:** Sure. You know me. Well, as a fellow trust fund baby, I feel bad for the ultra rich.

**John:** So this writer who’s writing in saying like, “If I broke in with an animation project, will I be able to join the WGA?” No.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Nope. So, on your next project, which is written for live action, yes, maybe so. And I don’t know of any examples, but I’m sure there are. Oh, wait, no, no, no. One of my first movies…this got complicated.

Titan A.E., at some point in its genesis, I think they talked about doing it live action, so there was one… — There was a window at which it became a WGA-covered project, and it wasn’t. That does happen sometimes where it is like it is not clear whether you are going to do this animation or live action.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So that can happen. I don’t know of other examples like that.

**Craig:** The one I can think of is Curious George which I think started as an animated project and then moved towards a hybrid. And they had to move it out of.. — They tried, I think they fought, as I recall; I think there was a fight to try and keep it non-union. But the Guild successfully argued no. No, the second you put somebody in there…

Interestingly, they put in, there is a little bit of live action in WALL-E. It’s the only incident of that in any Pixar movie. And it is Fred Willard as the president. He actually filmed. And I’m kind of curious…I guess if it is just for that small amount they just got around it.

**John:** Yeah. Happy Feet has a few moments that I’m pretty sure are real people as well.

**Craig:** Hmm. I didn’t see those films.

**John:** You are not missing much. If you like penguins dancing? If that’s your thing, penguins dancing…

**Craig:** I love penguins dancing!

**John:** Well then I don’t know why you have missed it so far.

**Craig:** What’s wrong with me?!

**John:** Well, there are a lot of things that are wrong with you, but unfortunately we are out of time and we can’t talk anymore.

**Craig:** I think it’s fortunate. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] So thank you, Craig. So, this was a podcast about, let’s see, luck.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Trust funds.

**Craig:** Yup. The Holocaust.

**John:** The Holocaust. Joe Eszterhas. And that really…

**Craig:** It’s a classic. And being utterly stupid.

**John:** Yeah. All these things, and more in this episode.

**Craig:** And more. [laughs] This was a good one. I like this one.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** Anytime I get angry I think it’s a good one.

**John:** Okay. We will call you stupid. I like it like…

**Craig:** Oh, it’s the best.

**John:** All right, thanks Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/amazons-new-deal-for-writers).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And you are listening to Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting, and things that are interesting to screenwriters. How are you, Craig?

**Craig:** I’m fine. How are you?

**John:** I’m good. I’m back. I’m back from four weeks in New York.

**Craig:** I love it. I can tell just from the tone of your voice.

**John:** Yes. I’m actually very tired, but I’m heavily caffeinated at the moment, so I will probably talk faster than usual.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** But I’m happy to back. I’m happy to be back in my bed. And this is a thing about being 40 years old, is I used to be able to kind of sleep anywhere. Like the first three years I lived in Los Angeles I didn’t have a mattress, I just had like two of those egg crate foam things on the floor of my apartment.

**Craig:** As did I.

**John:** Because I was broke. And, like, why spend money on a bed? But now that I am 40 years old, I have a really good bed. I have one of those Tempur-Pedic mattresses that is amazing and sort of absorbs all energy.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So for the four weeks I was in New York I just had the crappy bed that was in the apartment that I rented. You could feel the springs and all that. And I’m like, I could suffer through it. But then when you stop suffering through it and you get back to your real bed, it’s so good.

**Craig:** Yeah. I just got back from a week away with my family, and returning to your own bed is such a good feeling. What is not such a good feeling is you repeatedly pointing out that you are 40 years old knowing fully well that yesterday I turned 41. I know what you are up to.

**John:** But I’m actually 41.

**Craig:** Oh, ha-ha!

**John:** So I would be in my forties. I’m older than you. You are the younger person on this podcast.

**Craig:** When is your birthday?

**John:** August 4.

**Craig:** Oh, I got you by three months. Four months. Oh…the youth flowing through my body.

**John:** You actually have me by like nine months though if you just turned 41. I turned 41 before.

**Craig:** Oh, so you are going to turn 42. You are right. Better.

**John:** You are making feel better with each word you say.

**Craig:** I have you by eight months. Oh…

**John:** Yeah, you are the youngin’.

**Craig:** What’s it like being as old as you are?

**John:** Let me tell you, the aches and the pains…

**Craig:** Oh, yeah.

**John:** …you know, honestly, for the very first… — For like the last week or something I started to notice that I will at some point probably need reading glasses because I felt myself literally holding something a little bit further away.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** What it was, my daughter had like a little — it’s not a hang-nail, but it is that little piece of skin right around the edge of your finger nail that you just have to pull off with your finger nail, that little tag or whatever. And so she held it up to me and it was too close; I had to hold it back away. And, like, ooh, what is that?

**Craig:** My wife has to do that. She wears reading glasses now or holds things away from her face. I, as of yet, have not had that problem. But it is coming.

**John:** It’s coming.

**Craig:** You know what that is caused by, correct?

**John:** It is actually muscular changes.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Yeah, so it is not really the lenses in your eye. You can’t do a Lasik for that specifically.

**Craig:** It’s called Presbyopia. And Presby, the root, the same root of Presbyterian. And there are muscles in your eye that focus your eye on close things; and those muscles eventually get weak and tired as they have in your incredibly old eyeball. And as they get slack [laughs] and begin their inexorable slide towards non-function and death, old people like you have to wear reading glasses for close up reading. I’m so sorry.

**John:** No, it’s fine. I’ve actually come to accept the fact that this will have to happen. And I remember going on a meeting with Pete Berg. Pete Berg and I flew to New York City to meet with Will Smith — Will Smith of all people — about this movie that he ended up doing. And it was fine. But Pete Berg had like three sets of reading glasses hanging from his tee-shirt because he kept losing them and then picking them back up again.

It’s like, well, I don’t want to be that crazy person with a bunch of reading glasses. So, I’ve also noticed this really geeky trend of glasses that actually clip together, that snap together. They are magnetic and they snap together in front of your nose. So they sort of just dangle from a cord and you can snap them in front of your face.

**Craig:** I fully expect you to engage in that level of geekiness. No question.

**John:** [laughs] No question. No question at all.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** I thought we would start with a couple of questions.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** A writer writes in, “I’m writing my first spec. Think of Swingers meets Entourage,” oh, stop being Swingers meets Entourage, but okay, “located in LA. Would it be wise to include actual restaurants in the slug line, i.e. Rainbow Bar and Grill, or just something like Interior Restaurant — Day and then describe the restaurant’s features with a sentence? Keep in mind this is my first spec,” blah, blah, blah.

I flagged this question because it is about specificity. And if you are doing something that is very specific to a locale and to a group of people, if you were writing the next Swingers I think you should absolutely pick what the real locations are going to be in your script.

That may not be that you are actually going to end up shooting there, but if that specific location is important to you, use that specific location in your script.

**Craig:** Yeah, of course. I mean, this is the time when there are no clearances; there are no location fees or concerns. You can write anything you want. And there is absolutely nothing irresponsible about calling out specific locations if for no other reason than it conveys your intention to the reader.

**John:** Yes. And so the reader may not be familiar with that specific detail, so it is good to give a line of color to show what that location is like. Give us a sense of what that place is. It should be short — don’t over-describe your locations. But give us a sense of what that place is. Use the real name. Use the real everything you can so that it is meaningful to you and it is meaningful to your characters.

**Craig:** Even if people will never know what it is because it is sort of arcane to everyone, sometimes including those things helps convey a sense that you know what you are talking about. It makes the reader comfortable.

I remember when we were writing The Hangover sequel; obviously a lot of it took place in Bangkok. And we called out specific places all the time as if the reader would know just because it helped get you in the mindset of you were in a real place. So you should absolutely do that.

**John:** Now I have made it sort of my daily vow to talk about Lena Dunham’s Girls every day until the premiere of Girls. Girls is a new TV show on HBO that Lena Dunham wrote, and directed, and created. And it’s great.

And so I saw the first three episodes. HBO did a premiere in New York while I was there. And specificity is one of the main reasons why it is so good. It is so very specifically these characters at this point in their lives living in exactly this neighborhood. And its universality comes from the fact that everyone in this world is living a very specific, finely painted, detailed life.

And you believe the characters really are talking about the things that are interesting to them. So, specificity is…

**Craig:** I’m glad you pointed out that was a TV show because I had no idea what you were talking about. [laughs]

**John:** Wait, you really do not know? I feel like there has been a huge media saturation on this show.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** So there is outdoor… — Also, Craig Mazin, by the way, doesn’t watch TV or see movies. Apparently he actually closes his eyes so he can’t see outdoor ads. He can’t see…

**Craig:** I like reading books.

**John:** Oh yeah. But I feel like HBO has found a way to probably interject it into books, because they are doing a full on hard push on this show.

**Craig:** I did not even realize that this was…

**John:** Do you even know who Lena Dunham is?

**Craig:** No. [laughs] Who is that?

**John:** Wow, it’s so fascinating. So, Lena Dunham is a writer-director. Her second feature was this movie called Tiny Furniture which won awards at South by Southwest. I met with her, I loved her. Judd Apatow met with her, he loved her. He took the initiative to say, “Let’s make a show.” And so they pitched a show to HBO. They shot a great show, ten episodes. It airs, I think, next week some time. It starts April 15th I think.

**Craig:** And is it funny?

**John:** It’s really funny.

**Craig:** I like funny.

**John:** It’s like Louis C.K. or Larry David, but it is a 25-year-old young woman who has written, directed, and stars in the show. And so you meet her and you talk with her, and you are like, “Wow, you are the nicest person. I can’t believe you have survived being so incredibly busy and doing all of these things.”

**Craig:** Well, I will watch it, and I will look forward to us giggling over the fact that I had no idea who this person was.

**John:** Yeah. You have the HBO Go, so you can watch it even though you don’t watch normal TV because you do have an iPad. So you will be able to watch it.

**Craig:** I do watch Game of Thrones.

**John:** Yeah, look, who could not watch Game of Thrones?

**Craig:** And I watch Major League Baseball.

**John:** Yeah. That’s fine.

**Craig:** And that’s about it. [laughs] Yeah.

**John:** Our second question, “I recently listened to the Nerdist Writer’s Panel,” which is another podcast, which is actually quite good, so we will put a link to it because it is really good.

**Craig:** I’m sorry, what was it called?

**John:** The Nerdist Writer’s Panel.

**Craig:** Nerd-est?

**John:** Nerdist.

**Craig:** Shouldn’t it be Nerdiest?

**John:** Nope. Nope. Just Nerdist.

**Craig:** But that’s wrong.

**John:** Well, it’s not. It’s like racist but Nerdist.

**Craig:** Oh, I see. So they have an ism, like nerdism, and they are nerdists.

**John:** Yeah, exactly.

**Craig:** I thought it was Nerdest, but it is Nerdist.

**John:** Actually rather than going for racist, I should have gone for nudist. But Nerdist. The Nerdist Writer’s Panel.

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** And so it is a good podcast. And they bring in different writers, TV writers, screenwriters, and they talk about the writing that they are doing. It is sort of like how we always talk about how we are going to have guests on, but we never actually have guests on. They do.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, “On this podcast, Matt Nix was a guest.” So, first off, you basically need to discount anything Matt Nix says, because you and I both know that you can’t trust Matt Nix at all.

**Craig:** You can’t trust him as far as you can throw him.

**John:** What a horrible human being.

**Craig:** Bad man.

**John:** Oh, it’s actually, no — we should specify he is actually a very good guy. And he is the writer of Burn Notice, the creator of Burn Notice. And lovely, and he is involved in the WGA, and we love him to death.

**Craig:** And he lives up here by me in Pasadena, and that automatically gets you a pass as far as I’m concerned.

**John:** Well pretty much all working screenwriters and TV writers have to live either in Hancock Park where I live, or over in the La Cañada Flintridge area by you. That’s a rule.

**Craig:** I insist on it.

**John:** “Matt Nix talked about his career in features before he started working in television and shared his frustrations about not getting anything made despite working steadily for eight years. I was wondering whether you were ever tempted to go into the TV world. Obviously you can also work in television development and never get on the air, but at least sometimes you get to shoot a pilot and actually see your work materialize into something. And there is the possibility of working on staff on already existing shows. Is there any particular reason why you never worked in television? Is it something that you can see yourself trying at any point in your career?”

**Craig:** Well you did work in television.

**John:** That’s right. This is Luke from Poland. So, Luke from Poland, it is a well-written question about the American TV industry from somebody in Poland, which I love.

But I did work in TV. I have done three different TV shows. The first thing I did was called D.C., which was the same year that Go came out. And it was about five young people living and working in Washington, D.C. It was basically Felicity-after-college. And it was a disaster. It was a pretty good pilot I wrote, and okay pilot that we shot, and just a really bad series that I got fired from.

I did a TV pilot for ABC called Alaska, which you can also read on my blog. I have a library section; you can read the pilot for that, which turned out pretty well, which was a crime show set in Alaska back when no one was making things in Alaska. And I developed a show with Jordan Mechner called Ops which was about a private military corporation for Fox. And it was going to be way too expensive to shoot. And I just thank god every day that we didn’t try to shoot it.

So I think TV is great. And, so Craig, you have never developed anything for TV have you?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** So here is the thing about feature writers writing for TV is that it is so tempting and appealing because you actually shoot something. Like not every pilot gets shot, but a lot of pilots get shot. And if you are a decent feature writer who gets recruited to write a show for somebody, there is a decent chance you are going to shoot something. It’s going to be quick; like everything in feature land just takes forever.

At least in TV you kind of fail quickly. [laughs] You will write a script and you will turn it in, and they will call you like two hours later saying, “Nope, it’s not for us.” It’s like, “Oh, oh, oh, okay. There. Done.” And then you are done.

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** So I know feature writers who sort of consider it like a trip to the ATM, because you don’t get paid a lot of money for it, but you get paid quickly, and it is something, and it is meaningful.

The challenge, and I think the frustration, and the surprise that a lot of feature writers find is that if — God help you if they say yes and they like it, because then your life is just overwhelmingly consumed by making this TV show.

So, David Benioff, who was really a feature writer before this, now doing Game of Thrones, and good luck with doing anything other than Game of Thrones for awhile, David Benioff.

**Craig:** As was Dan Weiss, his partner on that show. Yeah. I have avoided television for two reasons. One, that reason, and two, what I have heard about TV is that there is this lie that they tell us all that the writer is king in television and the writer is in charge. That is sort of true. Certainly writers are creatively more dominant in television than directors.

However, what they don’t tell you, and what many of my feature friends who have dabbled in TV bemoan is that the amount of intrusion and mishegas you get from the studio network is mindboggling.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Every single thing. They are over your shoulder, criticizing, second guessing, nay-saying, everything. You can’t cast a guy saying, “Here’s your coffee, sir,” without them demanding 14 auditions and then saying, “We like this one.” Who cares?! What?

And just the thought of that grind. And I guess on top of all of it, to be honest, it is such a different kind of storytelling, and the kind of storytelling I like to do is self-contained. I like tell stories where somebody goes from one place to another and finishes. And I don’t like telling serialized stories per se, even in sequels.

You know, I like them to have a beginning, a middle, and an absolute end. And that’s that. So, it is not for me for lots of reasons. I think I would just get too bored, frankly.

**John:** Oh, to me it’s not boring. It’s the overwhelming churn of it. When you are writing a feature you are writing something, and you hand it in, and you get a little bit of time while they are reading it. In TV land, you turn in a script, and literally an hour later they are calling you with notes. You never get that downtime that you have come to kind of crave a little bit in feature land.

Like in feature land, like three weeks pass and you haven’t heard anything, and you are going crazy. But there must be some happy medium in between there. The other big challenge of TV, of course, is let’s say you are a writer and a director in feature land. You are either writing your script, or you are shooting your script, or you are editing your movie, or figuring out the marketing stuff you are doing, one of these jobs at a time.

In TV land you are doing all of it simultaneously. So, you are in a room breaking the entire season, figuring out what the episodes are for the entire season. You are trying to write a script. You are reading another script that is about to shoot. You are shooting a script. You are dealing with the wardrobe for that thing that is coming up. You are editing an episode you have already shot, and you are dealing with the network on the marketing stuff.

And so any one of those jobs could be a full-time thing. I remember talking to Damon Lindelof at the height of Lost, and literally like after dinner would be the time that he actually would be able to go up and start writing. Because the whole day was spent running a TV show.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** The running and the management; it’s a huge deal. But, there are some amazing things about that. And you are able to create these worlds that are unlike anything you have ever seen. And I really like TV. I would be doing a TV show right now; honestly I would be pitching a TV show if the musical hadn’t sort of sucked up every bit of time.

**Craig:** I think at this point I am starting now, even though I am so much younger than you are…

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** …I’m still old enough where I am starting to realize that I’m pretty deep into this journey and I suspect that I will continue writing features until a day comes when I am just kind of done, and want to stop in general and find something else to do with my life, and it won’t be TV.

**John:** So, Craig, are you going to direct more movies? Or are you going to mostly be writing?

**Craig:** That is something I am thinking about. I think that between now and when my kids –my youngest kid is seven, my older son is ten. So, my daughter is going to be gone in ten years, presumably college.

**John:** She won’t be taken away by aliens. She will be somewhere; she just won’t be under your roof.

**Craig:** Well, I don’t know. She might be. [laughs] We don’t know.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** But I think it safe to say in ten years, in one way or another, she will be gone. And then I will have quite a bit of a different kind of day, and a different sort of obligation to my family. And at that point, and quite a bit more experience under my belt, and at that point I might consider directing. I don’t know. I’m not sure.

But right now I have to say I am very happy screenwriting. I’m happier screenwriting now than I have ever been since I started. And, so might as well ride that. But, yes, I think about it. I think that it something I will return to. Cue the gnashing and wailing of critics.

**John:** [laughs] Honestly, part of the reason why I have been careful and selective about directing projects, in addition to the musical sort of wrecking in my life, is the overwhelming time commitment it takes to actually be in production, and the fact that you are not going to see your kid for a couple of months while you are shooting a movie. And that’s a big deal.

And this last week while I was in New York, I was able to bring my daughter to visit the rehearsal for just an hour or two while we were doing stuff. And she wasn’t going to be able to see the whole show, because is it too overwhelming of a show for her to see emotionally, but I wanted her to see that it is really hard work. I didn’t want her to sort of get the experience of, “Oh, suddenly everything is lovely. It’s like Glee. And suddenly everything is happening and no one had to do a lot of work.”

She saw us like running a scene 15 times trying to figure out how to make a joke be funny. And she saw us dancing. And she saw how we are trying to correct this one little tiny moment in the choreography. And that was more meaningful to me, not for her to see the finished product, but this is what your father is doing that is taking him away for three weeks, trying to get that joke to be funny.

**Craig:** Yeah. Daddy’s got a real job. Yeah. That’s a great experience. Even though I will — I often will travel with the movies that I write, the distance apart is a different kind of distance when you are directing because I can… — For instance, for the next Hangover movie, I go with the movie. I go with Todd. I’m there every day.

So, I might be away for weeks at a time from my kids. But when the day is done and I go back to the hotel room, I get on Skype and I talk with them, and I’m relaxed. It’s different.

When you are the director you are never relaxed. And you don’t have free time. And every waking moment you are being devoured by the enormity of your responsibility. And, so it is a different kind of away. It’s a bad thing.

**John:** Yeah. This last month I was in New York. I cannot imagine, I could not have survived it if it weren’t for Skype, if I couldn’t video chat home, I wouldn’t have been able to make it through there. I would have just been a mess.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Let’s go to our next question. A reader writes, I think actually Kevin writes, “I recently decided to start a new screenplay, and when describing the plot to a friend of mine he responded, ‘Oh, it sounds a lot like [movie title redacted].’ I immediately looked up the plot synopsis of that other title and saw there were some obvious similarities. I rented the movie, and thankfully that film and my yet to be written screenplay were actually very different. But let’s say both plot were actually similar. Intellectually I know that everything is down to execution, but I probably wouldn’t have the confidence to continue. Have either of you given up on a spec idea because it was too similar to another screenplay or movie?”

**Craig:** Well, you know, in a case like that where the movie actually exists, in a weird way you are in a better spot. Because you watch it, and if you decide, “No, my screenplay, even if it is the same basic idea is such a wildly different execution,” you will not be… — No one is going to sit there and go, “Oh my god, you just rewrote blankety blank.”

No, they are going to read your script and go, “Oh, it’s a lot like that movie so-and-so, but here is how it is different, or here is how the tone is different.” I mean, the example I always famously turn to — well, it’s not famous that I turn to it. It is a famous example that I turn to is Rain Man and Midnight Run.

**John:** Oh sure.

**Craig:** Almost the same movie about sort of a straight-laced guy who has to road trip across the country with a weird sort of self-obsessive nerd who refuses to fly because he is frightened. And two completely different movies; it’s just not an issue.

Now, if somebody says, “Oh, that sounds like something I have in development over at so-and-so,” now you have got a problem.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then the problem is movie studios really — it’s already a gamble to pay a $1 for a screenplay, much less $1 million. And so if they feel like they are going to get beaten to the punch by a similarly themed…they are more concerned about marketplace confusion and marketing than they are about anything else.

That said, every now and then you get two movies about a guy and a girl who are best friends who also sleep with each other.

**John:** Yeah. And it works out okay.

**Craig:** Yeah. It works out okay. There is Dante’s Peak and Volcano. There is A Bug’s Life and Antz.

**John:** And most famously there is Armageddon and Deep Impact. And so Kevin’s question was have I ever stopped doing something because there is something similar. Yes, I had this whole plan out for an asteroid hitting the earth movie. And basically you know the asteroid is coming and you have to make decisions about what is going to happen. And they announced Armageddon and Deep Impact. I was like, “Oh, okay.” Well, that’s a case where it is probably not a good idea for me to write that movie. And that’s okay.

**Craig:** Yeah. You might be able to beat one movie in development, but not two. [laughs]

**John:** And I always look at that as “now I don’t have to write that movie,” because someone else wrote that movie. That’s great. Freedom to do something else. It’s like a snow day. It’s like a creative snow day. “Yup, I don’t have to do that anymore. I can do something else instead.”

**Craig:** Plus, a little pat on the back that your instincts were correct.

**John:** Agreed. “And I have commercial instincts. Hoorah!”

**Craig:** Yeah. Great. Let me come up with another one.

**John:** Speaking of commercial instincts, let’s talk about the actual news of this last week, which is Amazon Studios changed basically everything. It was like, “Oh, we are making some changes.” No. “Basically we are completely changing our entire business model.”

**Craig:** Yeah. They were very clever about it. They were sort of like, “Oh, we are going to make a few changes.” And they did it that way because really what they did was they went from being an awful, awful place to a very good place. And to announce it that way would have been to admit that they used to be an awful, awful place. But now they are a good place.

And here’s what happened…

**John:** So we really should give some back story, because we can’t assume that everyone knows what Amazon Studios was.

**Craig:** Back story us.

**John:** Okay, so the back story is Amazon Studios is from Amazon… — What do you even call Amazon right now? They are an internet retailer, I guess?

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Fine. They also make Kindle’s and other things.

**Craig:** Yeah. They are an e-tailer.

**John:** Perhaps you have heard of Amazon. [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs] Yeah. I don’t think we need that much back story, John.

**John:** But we do need back story on the studio’s part of it. So, Amazon launched this initiative called Amazon Studios which was an attempt to do an end run around the sort of classical studio development, and let anybody in America or the world submit their screenplays to the site, and other users, other readers could read the screenplays, give notes on the screenplays, could rewrite the screenplays if they chose to, and Amazon would sift through this and take the most highly rated, and reviewed, and best liked screenplays and developed them further. Give awards to those people.

They would shoot little test movies from those things. And when they announced this, this was November 2010, I had had some conversations with some of the folks about it ahead of time, but I really based my reaction on what they announced. And I thought it was a really horrible idea for a couple of reasons.

The simplest reason is why would you want to, creatively as a person, why would you want to submit yourself to this process where anyone on the internet, any person who reads your script anywhere could rewrite your script and do whatever they wanted to do with it? And that didn’t make any sense.

And then you blogged at the same time — remember back when Craig used to blog?

**Craig:** Remember that?

**John:** Craig blogged, and we will find a link to that old blog post…

**Craig:** Amazon remembers. [laughs]

**John:** …about just the really bad financial and legal concerns.

**Craig:** Yeah. You had sort of thrown this great right hook that basically said this whole thing is kind of creatively corrupt. The whole point of screenwriting is that there is an authorial voice that is relating some kind of vision on a page, and this thing is sort of blowing that all to shreds.

And then I came in with a left hook and said, oh, and also, this is a sweatshop, basically that was not only end running the union and everything that the union brings us like minimums, and pension, and healthcare, and credits, and residuals, but was even more punitive than that. I mean, they were essentially kind of getting everything and being able to use it and resell it. They literally could… — You could write something, submit it; 15 people could rewrite it and then they could put it in a book and sell it, and you wouldn’t even get a dime. I mean, the whole thing was insane.

**John:** And if I remember the right terms, I think it was like 18 months they owned stuff. Like basically once you submitted it, they had over 18 months.

**Craig:** Yeah. They had it for 18 months. And I think they had an option to get it again. And there were no… — It was really bad.

If you link to the post I wrote people will be able to sort of sift though how bad it was. And what you and I did not know at the time, but what I have now learned to be true is that the enormous, many multi-billion corporation known as Amazon read your post, and read my post, and freaked out. [laughs] They were super angry. And apparently called around and called the Writers Guild complaining.

And the Writers Guild, to its credit, and to Executive Director David Young’s credit, entered into a dialogue with them that was predicated essentially on, “No, we think that you should adhere to these basic union rules. That is what this is all about.”

And I am very excited to say, even though it is not breaking news. This was reported a few days ago, but Amazon quietly and calmly has become a WGA signatory. So, if you submit your scripts to them, first of all you now have a lovely option of saying, “Actually, I’m submitting my script to you and I don’t want anyone to be able to touch it.” In fact, you have an option that says, “I don’t even want anybody to be able to read it. I just want you to read it, Amazon.”

Amazon is now saying if we purchase this literary material, that is to say exercise the option, or if we hire you to do any writing, we do so under the full MBA. So you get credit protections, and you get residuals, and pension, and health. And all of that great stuff.

It’s a huge, huge thing. And I have to say, here is why I think it is… — Well, let me back up for a second. First of all, I have to congratulate the Writers Guild and David Young. Spectacular job. And I think it is important for us to say that there is a path to success with organizing that doesn’t involve striking. One of the things that I heard all the time during the strike from very prominent screenwriter was, “The Writers Guild has never gotten a single thing without a strike.” And that is just not true. And there is a way to do this, especially now, and it does involve influential voices, such as yours John…

**John:** And yours, Craig.

**Craig:** Well thank you. Pointing out some very embarrassing things. And I remember when I joined the board, it was actually a year into my term when Patric Verrone came into office with a bunch of his guys. They were big on this whole idea of corporate campaigning. And the notion of corporate campaigning is to embarrass companies for things that are sort of away from the field of play that you are on.

So, if you want to get them to give you reality television, you embarrass them for, I don’t know, investing in toxic chemical companies or something like that. That doesn’t really work. It’s all a bunch of bunko. What does work is your thing is bad. The thing that involves me is bad and here is why, because that is what you know and you can make an excellent case. And that is exactly what happened here. And I have to congratulate Amazon frankly for putting big boy pants on and acting gentlemanly, and recognizing that writers, professional writers, deserve to be treated with this basic minimum amount of respect.

So, that was terrific. And I think that Amazon has gone from something that I sort of viewed as this toxic repository that was abusing writers, to an excellent new option for professional screenwriters. I don’t know if Amazon and their model will ever be successful. What I do know is this: the companies for whom we work primarily, the big studios, can no longer point to Amazon and say, “Well look, we have to compete with those guys, so we have to somehow roll this contract back.” That is now off the table.

In that regard, this is a big step. It also means that if Google or Facebook or anybody else like that should try and get into this space, there is now precedent for the Writers Guild to say, “Great. Do this deal. Just like Amazon.”

**John:** So let’s talk about whether this is a good idea for the individual aspiring screenwriter. Because the original Amazon deal I thought was a bad deal for pretty much everybody, except for Amazon. If you were maybe that screenwriter who had the script that was sitting in the trunk that had never gotten any traction, maybe you submitted it to Amazon and just saw if it stuck.

Now, I don’t think it would be anyone’s first choice to go to, but if you have a script that maybe has won some contests, or got some notice in contests but hasn’t gotten you an agent, but is probably a pretty good script, it might make sense to try this process. The new terms — I think it is like a 45-day exclusivity of an option period. Amazon, if they like something, can extend it for additional time. They can pay you like $10,000 to extend it for additional time. It is not a bad deal…

A lot of times with the original deal, writers would leave comments on my original post and say, “Well, it’s a choice between this or nothing, so I am going to take this.” Well, it was worse than nothing there. Now this really is sort of an alternative to getting nothing out of your script. It is a chance to get someone to actually read it and pay attention to it, and maybe want to try to buy it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, first of all, let me address this “it was better than nothing” argument, because I got that on my blog, too, at the time. And it incenses me.

Here is why that is stupid: you are either going to be a professional screenwriter or you are not. If you are not, then it doesn’t matter because you are not going to be a professional screenwriter. It doesn’t matter if it is better than nothing; you are not going to win nothing either. You stink.

If, however, you are going to be a professional screenwriter, all you have done is weakened your own hand and weakened the hand of everybody else around you. You have begun the process of termiting through the lumber that supports the floor upon which we all sit. And down the line you will suffer. No question. Either you act like a professional who belongs in the professional game, or don’t. That is, to me, such bedrock principle. That is why I am grateful for all the people who came before me who didn’t just think about themselves at the time, but thought about writers to come. And that is why writers in their 20s should not be reluctant to make sacrifices for writers in their 30s, because they will be writers in their 30s, and so on and so forth.

It’s just a terrible argument. In the question of how writers should now view Amazon, I think they should view it as a very legitimate employer. Look, the choice of is it your first choice, I mean, I think that everybody sort of recognizes that studios that make and distribute films directly are probably still the premiere choice, because they make and distribute films. And that is a very powerful thing. If I sell a screenplay to Universal I know that they don’t have to go find a distributor; they are a distributor.

However, there are a ton of companies out there that are in the same boat as Amazon as far as I’m concerned. And if you have material that is not attracting the eyes of the gatekeepers, but you think has a chance of attracting the popular eye, well I have to say Amazon is a great choice now because one thing that I know about the gatekeepers is that they are particularly bad at determining their own value set for what good is. All they really do, in the majority, is chase what they think people want.

If people tell them what they want, chase over. And your material will get purchased. And it will eventually find its way to a studio. And at that point you are off and running.

So, I think Amazon has gone from a red flag to a perfectly legitimate, perfectly respectable avenue now for screenwriters to seek their first professional opportunity.

**John:** Yup. I have some ongoing concerns with how they are presenting this new version of themselves, which is their open writing assignments. So, an open writing assignment classically is a project that is at a studio where they are looking for a writer to come in. So, it could be a piece of property that they purchased, like they bought a book and now it is an open writing assignment. It could be a remake they are making. Or it could be a script that they have worked on and now they feel like they need to bring another writer in to do some new work.

One of the things they are pitching with this new version of Amazon Studios is, “And we have two open writing assignments. We have,” I think, “it’s Twelve Princesses and I Think My Facebook Friend is Dead and we are going to be looking for writers for those two things.” That feels a little weird to me. And it feels like every script should have new writers come in and do some work on it.

And it is entirely possible that they have worked with those original writers, and they feel like they have come to a point where they can’t go forward on the project now. But that’s, I don’t know; saying that publicly feels really weird.

**Craig:** Well, but is it…it’s the public part that is bothering, because that is all that studios do.

**John:** It is. But, I mean it’s an internal thing. It’s never announced in the world that another screenwriter is coming in to rewrite this thing.

**Craig:** You think it’s embarrassing to the writer? Is that what you’re saying?

**John:** It’s a little bit embarrassing to the writer, and even though it is the way reality often works, publicizing it like that, you should be trying to get one of these two slots to rewrite these big projects feels really weird. They are saying, like, “These are the best two things we have. And we are bringing in new writers to rewrite them.” That feels a little bit weird.

**Craig:** Well, it is weird, but it is the exact same weirdness that goes on at studios. I mean, they sort of say, “Look, this is a script that we believed in so much we spent $1 million to buy it, and then we spent $2 million more for really big shot writers to rewrite it. And now we are saying we love it so much we want a new writer to work on it.”

**John:** And you just hit on exactly why I was chaffing about it, because when you have that big show — “These are our best two things and we are bringing in someone new to work on it” — you bring in your heavy hitters. I’m the kind of person you bring in to do that work that you feel like you need to do to take it to its final level.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You are not saying, like, “Some writer in America could be the right person to do it, some writer who has never sold a screenplay before.” You are not going to the brand new person to rewrite that thing to put it into production. That is just not how stuff works.

**Craig:** That’s right. But here is what is interesting: Amazon is going to learn just the way everybody else that first starts in this business learns. There is a learning curve for them as well. And I think that they have a certain hope that there is more talent out there than has yet to be discovered by the traditional method.

But they are going to sort of American Idol, like find Kelly Clarkson, and it is going to be great. And it might. But, I suspect it won’t.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I know that people don’t like it when I say these things, because they think I’m a snob, and they think that I am a talentless jerk anyway, so how dare I. But as talentless as I am [laughs], I think that Amazon at some point may come to say, “Look, we have a property here that Warner Brothers is actually interested in making. We have gotten as far as we can with the methods we have been employing. Maybe we should think about actually coming up with a different method, or, maybe not.” That’s their choice. But as far as I’m concerned from the business end of it, they are at least doing it honorably. They are now fulfilling the basic minimum requirements that an employer must fulfill.

**John:** And here is why I wish them every success, and this is honest, is they have a tremendous amount of money. And there are a lot of other technology companies that have a tremendous amount of money. And if Amazon has success making some movies, and making money off of some movies, I hope that will loosen the purse strings of some of these other giant companies — the Facebook’s, who just spent $1 billion to buy Instagram today, to make some movies.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** Because more money in the system really helps the whole film industry. And it especially helps screenwriters who are essentially the research and development of the film industry.

Right now, a lot of the tensions we are facing are really economic tensions. There is just not enough money in the system right now to pay for as much development as we would like there to be. And I think that would greatly benefit our film industry. And two years from now there could be some real payoff. Even if Amazon hasn’t made much out of this, the fact that they are trying to do this will get other people inspired to do it.

**Craig:** No question. No question whatsoever. It surprises me that it has taken tech companies this long to sort of fallow the lead of Pixar. Pixar was this tiny little company that was making hardware, and decided to make movies to advertise their hardware, and have become a true giant, and a true studio, as big and as powerful as any. And while we say that Disney “owns” them, you can make the argument that Pixar in a weird way owns Disney. They are merged. They are one in the same, but they are enormous.

And there is no reason that these other guys couldn’t arrive at that place. What Amazon, the philosophical decision Amazon has made is to not find a genius like Lasseter and Andrew Stanton, and Peter Docter, and Joe Ranft, and so on, but rather to open it up to the vox populi and see if there are some diamonds in the rough.

I am an elitist. I tend to feel like you have to find really, really brilliant to guide these things, but again, they may arrive there. You are absolutely right: it is a great thing. And certainly for us, to have another legitimate big deep-pocketed MBA signatory — we haven’t had one of those… — You have to understand. You know this. And I’m betting most of our listeners do, too. Fox, Columbia, Universal, Disney, Paramount, Warner Brothers. Those are the big ones, right? I’m not missing any?

**John:** You got them all.

**Craig:** Okay. Those have been the primary deep moneyed employers of screenwriters since the beginning of movies.

**John:** I actually ran a post on this that Horace Deidu had done this great chart that showed basically the top six studios have always been the top six studios.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And there have been some mergers along the way, but basically you can go back to the ’20s, and it is essentially the same companies.

**Craig:** That’s right. But today there is a seventh company that is signatory to the Writers Guild that has an enormous amount of money, frankly, more than some of the studios. And that is huge news for us if it turns the way I hope it does.

I hope that Amazon eventually realizes that there is more profit developing screenplays with, I guess I would say there is more profit targeting great screenwriters than there is sort of panning for gold in a kind of fun marketing type of way.

**John:** My very first instinct with Amazon when they talked about doing a new kind of deal, and making a studio, is that you have tremendous amount of money and you also have tremendous amount of reach with everyone who comes to Amazon every day. So, you know so much about the people who are buying your products. You can target things to them.

And Facebook could do it better than anybody else could. Can you imagine Facebook running a studio? It would be nuts.

**Craig:** Well, it would be. Part of the interesting thing about it is I think each of these places has their own DNA. And they want to impose their DNA on the development process. So, some of that means Amazon’s way of saying, “Everyone can be a screenwriter, and it’s open to all, and we are throwing the doors open,” and maybe Facebook wants to make it all about social connections and people reading and liking and so forth.

But the truth is none of that crap has anything to do with developing a good screenplay. Developing a good screenplay happens when a good writer with a good idea works with a good producer, the way a novelist works with an editor, all in concert to fill the vision of a studio that is focused on making good movies of a sort. That doesn’t change.

So, what I hope happens is that Facebook and Google and Amazon jump into this, at some point realize that the way that they run their normal businesses really doesn’t have anything to do with this, but what does have to do with this is all of their money. And that they can make a ton of money doing this.

And then once they have some kind of brand that means something in the movie space the way that Pixar means something, that becomes extraordinarily powerful for them. And, the more competition that we have, you know, so if six major employers become nine major employers, this is a very good thing for us.

**John:** Agreed. Yeah. Even the small consolidations that have happened over the last few years, like we lost New Line as a separate company. It hurt. And it is one less buyer for a spec script, but it is also one less set of development projects that are out there. If New Line was developing 30 projects, well, those are 30 writers who can be employed. And when that goes away, a lot goes away.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** The other reason to be hopeful, if Amazon is spending some money here, even if it is a company that doesn’t have the intention of really getting deeply into development, or trying to be their own brand, it may just take some of that digital money and push it back towards our system. And so the same way that Disney used to make movies by, they would have these investment packages where basically you could buy into a share of — I forget what it was called. I will have to look it up.

But for awhile they would basically build a slate of movies and you would invest into a slate of movies. That kind of stuff can happen and getting more money into the system helps.

**Craig:** Yeah, like a big Kickstarter for a $200 million movie.

**John:** $200 million Kickstarter is what we need.

**Craig:** Yeah. Or a Kiva Loan. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. Absolutely. [laughs] Micro-lending. Macro-lending. Something.

**Craig:** So it was good news. Good news.

**John:** It’s all good news. And it is great to be back in Los Angeles and at my proper podcasting setup. I have been on my little 13-inch MacBook Air for the last four weeks. And honest to god it is a terrific computer, I love it to death, but I don’t feel at home until I am in front of my big monitor with my weird keyboard and my actual microphone. So it is nice to be back.

**Craig:** I know how that is. I, too, am a creature of habit.

**John:** Well, creature, thank you again for a lovely podcast.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Have a great week. And we will talk soon.

**Craig:** See you later.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/all-apologies).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is the 3rd intro that I just did for Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting, and things that are interesting to screenwriters. How are you, Craig?

**Craig:** Uh, I’m exhausted. I’m so tired right now. Anything could happen. I could say anything.

**John:** Well, today we are going to mostly answer questions, so it should be kind of easy.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** This won’t be a particularly taxing one is what I am trying to say.

**Craig:** Thank God. Because normally, normally, I need to be on my A-game for this sort of thing.

**John:** Yeah. But your C-game, we will let it slide.

**Craig:** Yeah. Oh, by the way, my C-game may end up being my A-game. We will find out.

**John:** You never know.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We wanted to start off with an update because in a previous podcast we had talked about Toph Eggers who had written a criticism of Steve Koren, who is a fellow screenwriter, that we thought was poorly done. It was a bad choice of something to write about, and it was not the correct thing to do. And we sort of went at length on our feelings about that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But he wrote a follow up piece that was actually pretty nice.

**Craig:** Yeah. It was a pretty well thought out apology. I mean, I guess that is the headline, really, is that he apologized for it, and seems to own completely that he behaved poorly and boorishly. And not only did he apologize in a very convincing and thorough manner, but he also touched on why what he did was wrong, and why in fact Steve Koren doesn’t deserve harassment at all.

It was an A+ apology. And so I offer Toph Eggers my A+ acceptance.

**John:** He wasn’t really apologizing to you specifically, but acknowledgement.

**Craig:** I think he was apologizing to me, because I see everything as about me. [laughs]

**John:** Oh, I forgot the solipsism and narcissism that draws everything out.

**Craig:** Yes. Like he performed the role of “guy apologizing to me” extraordinarily well. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] But I would say, I like apologies, and I like apologizing. It’s weird that people aren’t better at it. I hate the modern form of apology which is, “I’m sorry you were offended.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** This weird way of sort of redirecting it back at somebody, saying, “Oh, it is your fault that you were offended, but I don’t want you to feel bad about it in a strange way.”

**Craig:** Yeah. Liked I’m not apologizing for what I did; I’m apologizing for the weird interaction between what I did and your thin skin.

**John:** Yeah. Really apologizing and genuinely apologizing feels so good.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s like coming out, but of a blame thing.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. In fact, I remember during the strike when my blog was hoppin’, and there was an enormous amount of attention, I made a mistake. And the mistake that I made was I gave an interview to the LA Times, and in that interview I was very clear about the way I felt, but perhaps I was not as specific about insisting that they include a certain amount of context in what I said.

And when I read the article the next day, they had basically left out half of what I said and made me sound in a way, frankly, that was unflattering and counterproductive to what I wanted, which was an effective resolution to all of this. I wanted something good for the union and I didn’t like the way they made it sound. And people attacked me.

Now, the people attacking me, that was sort of par for the course; I would get that every day. But on that one, they were right, and the mistake that I made was, frankly, not taking my — not being as careful with the responsibility I had that came with the, I guess, my public presence. And I didn’t manage it well enough. And I apologized. And interestingly, I would say half of the people who follow the blog accepted the apology and took it for what it was, which was my mea culpa, and the other half viewed it as an opportunity to kick even more dirt in my face.

And I find people who do that particularly off, you know. [laughs] If somebody makes an apology, why not accept it? I mean, they are apologizing. If you won’t accept the apology all you are really doing is eliminating future apologies from people like that.

**John:** Yeah.

Wait, okay, I just did that thing where I say, “Yes,” and you say something long, and I just said, “Yeah.” It’s part of the drinking game apparently.

**Craig:** You did the “Yup” thing, yeah. You did the “Yup” thing.

**John:** I’m so sorry I just “Yupped” you.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** [laughs] I was reading the transcript of our podcast. One of the unusual things about our podcast is we do actually provide a transcript of all our podcasts a few days later, and it is on at johnaugust.com, you can look for it there. And I was reading through it, which I don’t usually read through it, but I was reading though it and this new person who is transcribing it will put in all of the yeahs that we have, and we say “Yeah” a lot.

**Craig:** We do.

**John:** And I tend to say “Yeah” after you have said something long and profound. And I will just follow it up with a “Yeah.”

**Craig:** I know. It takes all of the wind out of my sails. I feel so good. There is like a brief moment after I finish saying something profound and important where I feel so good. And it usually lasts about a second. And then you say, “Yup,” and then it is all gone.

**John:** Would you prefer in the future that I just leave a long, awkward silence, and then come back?

**Craig:** No. I think instead of saying, “Yeah,” because obviously there is nothing wrong with saying “Yeah” but I think a better word would be, “Wow.” [laughs]

**John:** How about a slow clap. [claps]

**Craig:** [laughs] I would also like a slow clap! I mean, I’m working my butt of here, man.

**John:** Maybe we could provide some sound effects that would sort of show the “Ooohh…”

**Craig:** You know what? We should sweeten this with laugh track and the Full House, “Ooohh!” I love it. Stuart, get that.

**John:** Stuart is on it. One of the most enjoyable things you can watch if you have about a minute to kill is Big Bang Theory without the laugh track. Have you seen this?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** So they take like two minutes of the Big Bang Theory, of an episode, and they just take out all of the laughter, and your realize it is just such a creepy, strange show if you take out the laughter. Because they will say these weird things, and then there will just be awkward silence [laughs]. It looks like a show about serial killers.

**Craig:** That is why I always feel the jump from — and there are people who do it successfully — but jumping from sitcoms to movies is an enormous gulf because there is absolutely no help. And when you whiff, it is brutal. Brutal. Nothing is worse than silence. And, also, impacts every joke after it.

The more you don’t hear laughing, the less you want to laugh.

**John:** My friend Melissa is on a show now that is shot 3-camera with a live studio audience. And so I was talking with her, and they do pre-tape certain things, or they will stuff, like if they are driving a car and it is a green screen thing, so they may pre-record it, or they will do it just to sort of — they will do it for the live, studio audience with them just sitting on boxes on the stage and do it, and then they will actually go back and film the real thing. And they will patch it up with the laughter after the fact.

But she says it is just so odd when you have the audience there and they are anticipating the laugh, and you are waiting for the laugh, and then you have to try to match it in a context when you don’t have that. It has to be frustrating.

**Craig:** Very strange. Are you talking about your friend, Melissa McCarthy?

**John:** I am talking about my friend, Melissa McCarthy.

**Craig:** That’s my friend, Melissa McCarthy, now.

**John:** Oh, you get to work with her now.

**Craig:** Yeah. She’s mine. I took her from you.

**John:** She’s moving on up.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s right. She graduated. [laughs]

**John:** Let’s get to some questions here.

**Craig:** Let’s do it.

**John:** Because questions are easy and I don’t say “Yup” at the end of them.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Scott asks, “Recently my partner and I sold our first spec to a major studio. It had been a long process that entailed attaching two major movie stars, and Oscar-winning producer, before it went to the market. When it did finally go out, it ended up in a minor bidding war that ended up with a truly modest deal. My question is, what do we do now? After we finish the two rewrites promised in our deal, where should we be putting out time and energy? What should we be asking our agents and managers to do for us? Should we be trying to pitch for existing assignments? Should we be trying to pitch original ideas? Should we be specking something? Should we try to get on staff for a series? What should we do?”

**Craig:** Okay, that last one threw me for a bit, because it sounded like they are feature writers.

**John:** They are feature writers I would say that a lot of feature writers sort of entering right now are really feature and TV people.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And I think it is maybe smart. We can talk about that, too.

**Craig:** Yeah. No, I get that.

**John:** Don’t limit yourself to one thing.

**Craig:** No, I get that. I think it depends on how this particular project has gone for them. Assuming, I’m going to assume the best and it has gone well. If it has gone well then you have material and relationships that prove that you can do the job of professional screenwriting. So, if it were me, I would be asking my agents to get me general meetings and specific meetings about open assignments. Even if none of those meetings turn into work, they turn into relationships, which turn into work. Maybe not immediately, but done the road.

And simultaneously, I would be developing a pitch as soon as possible.

**John:** Yeah. You are going to have to focus your attention in a couple different areas and figure out what is most likely to work for you. But you are going to be going out on generals, which is basically the, “Hey, hello, how are you?” It is the bottled water tour of Los Angeles, where you sit down with all of the junior execs at different places and you see who you like and who you get along with.

Most of those meetings won’t really amount to anything, but they put a face with a name, and talk about stuff you like to write.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Some of those things will be going in for open assignments. And open assignments means that there is a movie that they want to make, or they have an idea, or some piece of property that they are talking to writers about doing. You want to go in and pitch on some of those, because some of those will become jobs. They will actually pay you to do them.

They are also incredibly good practice to figure out how to pitch a movie and how to take a nebulous idea and shape it as a movie and be able to present it to somebody. So, you are going to want to do some of that.

The danger, and what I have seen happen a lot, is you end up pitching on so many of these things that you are not writing anything new. So at the end of a year, all you have was that thing that you sold and a bunch of sort of pitches for movies you can’t make because you don’t have the underlying property.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So I would say, I don’t know, if it is you and your writing partner, maybe you just break it down by day, or you break it down by sort of overall percentage of your time. But maybe on Mondays you are only going to work on your own stuff, which is you are writing that new spec, or figuring out your own pitches for something you can go out with. And Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday, maybe you are going out on meetings and doing other people’s stuff.

But, you are going to have to plan for both things being possible. And if TV is a real possibility, you are going to have to have an honest conversation with your agents about what is the series, what is the season that they need you to be available to do stuff to go out on those meetings. What do they need from you to be able to show people so they can get you staffed on the show?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You are going to probably need to write something new. So it is not just a matter of, “Oh, I will do TV and someone will hire me.” It’s a tremendous amount of work to try to get hired on a TV show.

**Craig:** That’s the key. It is a tremendous amount of work. I think no matter what you are endeavoring, and this is the time when you must be extraordinarily aggressive with your time. You have to really work hard right now, because the door has been opened slightly. And I know that everybody has a romantic point of view on this, that when you finally get there and you have your break, the door is kicked open. And then you get to trip through the field of daisies and pick the jobs you want.

And, in fact, all they have really done is cracked the door slightly. You are going to have to work, and work, to get to that next thing. You want to be a professional writer, you need not one job, not two jobs, not three jobs. I think five jobs. Now you are one of the workforce. Now you are a known quantity.

And so you actually do need, unfortunately, to do a lot of work. And I totally echo your concern about over pitching on open assignments because here is the reality of those: they are a little bit of fool’s gold because nine times out of ten they end up going to whomever a director or actor wants, or a big writer, and you will exhaust yourself and your creative tools by cracking and solving problems for nothing, over and over and over.

So, be careful with those, which is why I suggest — there is nothing wrong with it. You are right; going on those is great practice. And it also helps show your problem solving side to these people. But general meetings are also great. And, pitch. Find something new and get out there and pitch it, because they are always looking for new stuff. And you guys get to walk into the room as people who have done it before, which is a big deal.

So, work hard right now.

**John:** Yes. And whatever you are taking out for your pitch should be something in the same ballpark as the thing that you sold. Because people read that script and they said, “Oh, we like this thing,” you know, minor bidding war. They were like, “Oh, there is something here that is promising.” So, if you sold a sci-fi/action movie, don’t try to go out with a comedy pitch next. That shouldn’t be your next spec because people aren’t going to know what to do with that. And they put you on some list, and they want to work with you, but they are not sure what to do with you on what list.

If you are going out to pitch on an open assignment, maybe that is a chance where you are going to stretch yourself to a genre that isn’t necessarily just like your spec. And they can see you do that because it is lower stakes.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I guess the only thing I would say is if you have a terrific pitch that is of a different kind of thing, but you believe in it, and you think it is sellable, then you just have to make sure that the expectations are managed before you walk in the room. That they here, “Listen, the guys who wrote this great science fiction/action-adventure have actually come up with this, amazingly have come up with this, incredible romantic comedy, which sounds like they wouldn’t be able to do it, but they have. So if you are looking for that, they would love to come in and talk to you about it.”

But, frankly, this is rarely a problem. Usually people have a natural genre. And early on in your career you should be going for depth rather than breadth, if that makes sense.

**John:** Yeah. You want to be like the guy who they want to do this next project that is sort of like that other project. That can be helpful. A little bit of pigeonholing is helpful very early on in your career.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I got pigeonholed as the guy who was adapting kids’ books. I didn’t only want to adapt kids’ books, which is why I wrote Go. The useful thing with Go, just even as a script, is I could go out for comedies with it, I could go out for action movies with it. I could go out for a lot of different kinds of movies with that script.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s right.

**John:** Our next question is from a guy named Ruckus.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** “When handing in a rewrite, do either of you preface the draft in correspondence? My writing partner and I just submitted a pretty substantial rewrite, and I found myself struggling with the email. There were a few suggestions made by the producer that we didn’t think worked, but we found an alternate and hopefully more elegant solution in the writing. Is it better to let the producer know how you might have veered from the notes going into the reading, or should you let the script stand on its own?”

That’s a really good question.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s a great question. First, I must of course say, “Can you describe the ruckus?” John, can you identify that quote?

**John:** No.

**Craig:** “Can you describe the ruckus?” I believe it is The Breakfast Club. “I heard a ruckus.” “Can you describe the ruckus?”

**John:** Oh, I don’t know The Breakfast Club that well.

**Craig:** My attitude about it is this: if you feel that you have addressed a problem in a creative and interesting way, that is good, go with it. It is a gamble, but it is a gamble that pays off huge if it works because all I think everyone that doesn’t write, but who advises writers on how to improve their writing, is secretly hoping that you are going to come back and just make them happy. They don’t really want to move your hand for you and type the words for you.

If they could do that, they would be writing. So, if you have a great solution that is off the beaten path of the notes, there is nothing wrong with saying, “Listen. We have in our back pocket the solution we all talked about, but we really wanted to try this.”

And if they don’t like it, just say, “Listen. You know what? It was something we believed in, and we thought about it. We always have the make good back here if we need to kind of go in that direction.” But, there is nothing wrong with showing, in my mind at least, nothing wrong with showing some creativity and some proactiveness, as it were.

**John:** I agree with you. I think if you have the better solution, let the better solution speak for itself. The only case where I would say to think twice is if you have promised that you are going to do a certain kind of thing, and then you don’t do that. Like let’s say you are working with a director and a studio, and you need to turn in this draft. If you promise a director you are going to do something, and you couldn’t do that thing, and you did this other thing instead, you have got to at least tell him or her that that that is there.

Because if it is going to everybody at once, and then they are surprised, and there is cross-talk that is not involving you, that is going to be a real problem.

**Craig:** I agree.

**John:** So there are cases where you want to either have that phone call or have that email ahead of time and everyone knows what is going on.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know, it is really important to ask yourself, “How surprising will this be? And what if they don’t like it? Is this surprise going to compound the negative reaction?”

If you are going to really surprise them with something big, you have got to let them know ahead of time. Frankly, it has less to do with courtesy and more to do with being effective as a screenwriter. Because when people are shocked and surprised, they start to have an emotional reaction that is going to absolutely get in the way of their experience reading the script. That is just something you have to start to feel out, like what are kind of landmine type changes that you need to let them know about ahead of time to protect yourself and the work, and what are things that you can kind of just sort of go about because you are the writer of the script, and you are not a reactor.

**John:** Yeah. The more going into this rewrite process, you were talking about the areas that you were going to work on, but not the specific solutions, then you have a lot more freedom to do whatever you needed to do in order to get that thing to work right.

It is when… — A lot of times when you get very close to production and you had to sort of pitch the exact thing that you were going to do, not down to the word, but it is going to be this, and it is going to fit in this little place, and it is going to be this scene here, that is where it becomes tough where if you are doing something that is just very different it is going to ripple through other changes.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And then maybe you need to really warn people about that.

**Craig:** Yeah. And then there is sort of like, “What is the deal with these people? They are just not reliable. I don’t want to hire this guy again because we all discussed something in the room, he agreed, he went off. He came back and suddenly the guy that was supposed to be a little bit more of a mature dad instead of a bumbling dad has become an uncle from out of town who has no kids at all. What the hell is going on here?”

So be respectful of the fact that there is somebody else on the other end of this conversation.

**John:** Yes. Our next question. Max asks, “I have been writing specs for a while now, and working with producers. I have tons of drafts of several scripts — notes in every draft, brainstorming, what have you. I am just wondering how you, someone who has had infinitely more notes and files to deal with, keeps everything accessible and in place?” So just organization strategy for drafts and files.

**Craig:** That is a question for you. You are the Sort Master.

**John:** I am the Sort Master. But I don’t deeply sort. Most things that I am working on actively, I have in Dropbox so that I can reach them through whatever computer that I am in. Or, I can pull them up on my iPad if I need to. So, in Dropbox I have folders for each of the basic projects. So I have one for Preacher, for Frankenweenie, for whatever, and all of the drafts and everything related to it goes in there.

If something is like an email and is attached to an email, I don’t always drag it out of there and stick it into Dropbox. I kind of feel like mail is another way to get to some of that stuff. And a lot of times if I am looking for a specific PDF that I sent through to somebody else, I will just pull it out of mail rather than pulling it out of Dropbox, because at least then I can see the context of what this last thing was that I sent.

But I am just using Dropbox for basically everything. And I am being very lazy, and sort of hoping that Dropbox doesn’t mess it up for me, for my active stuff.

For older backup stuff, I have it on just a “Projects” hard drive. I have a big tower, and I have four hard drive slots in there. I have one that I use for projects, and I just keep everything related to those projects in those folders in there. And that one I back up once a week.

**Craig:** I don’t really think that there is anything lazy about it, I mean, the way you just described it. Frankly, it is not like our job of archiving is that intense. I do a very similar arrangement to you. I have a folder that is essentially a writing archive. Everything that is done, that sort of sits on a folder, and all of that stuff is mirrored to Dropbox as well. I like Dropbox, just mostly because of the backup factor.

I mean, I take my laptop with me wherever I go, though it is nice to always have mobile access. And the projects that are scripts in progress, that is its own folder. And in that, each of those things, there will be — for instance, in my Identity Theft folder I organize things by sort of treatment. So anything in the treatment folder is all the stuff that led to up to the first draft. Then there is first draft folder. There is the second draft folder. And then once the movie gets green lit, then I create a production drafts folder. And in that folder there is a white folder, a blue folder, a pink folder, a salmon folder, and yada, yada.

**John:** That is actually much more organized than what I do. I just keep it in one big folder and I sort it by date. And the most recent stuff is at the top, and I can usually find everything I need.

**Craig:** Who would have thought that I would be the neat one? [laughs] No one!

**John:** The tidy one.

So now what are you doing with just like little bits of scraps that aren’t quite movies or projects yet? Do you have any sort of dump file for that? I use Evernote for it. Are you using anything like that for storing the bits and pieces of things?

**Craig:** If I have an idea, or a little bit of something, it is almost always attached to a project. And what I will do is I will just make a folder for that project. So, even if I don’t quite know what it is, if it is like, “Okay, I have this idea for a historical drama,” I will just write a folder that says, “Historical Drama Idea,” and then I will put that stuff in there.

But, I don’t have a folder that is, like, “Ideas” or “Whims.” Everything gets kind of a spot.

**John:** I started using Evernote because I did have a folder for like bits and pieces, and I would never really check that folder because there were just drips and drabs and stuff. Or, if I made a new folder for something, a year later I would go back and see a folder that had exactly one file in it. And it was like, “Well, that was weird.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s like that idea sort of never came to anything more than that. So, the stuff that I feel is kind of interesting, that could be a movie somewhere, I’m throwing that into Evernote right now. It’s not perfect.

I use for my day-to-day keeping track of stuff I need to do, I am using OmniFocus, and I will sometimes — I am debating between the “someday maybe” kind of tag you can put on stuff. And so there will be a little idea, and I will put a “someday maybe” on it, and that way it just kicks up for review every couple of weeks. And so it is like, “Oh, that little thing I was thinking about, is that still something I am thinking about? Or should that just go away?”

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m okay with the notion that there are… — I mean I have a couple of folders in my Scripts in Progress master folder that I haven’t touched in three years. And I am okay with that. They are there mocking me, and I like it. I like that one day I will have to address either their mortality or breathe some life back into them.

**John:** Cool. Our next question comes from Salvi from Los Angeles. He asks, “I read about spec scripts or screen rights ‘going to auction.’ Although I am familiar with the concept of an auction, I am wondering if you can explain what exactly this means in a Hollywood setting. What is the process, the formalities? Who manages the auction? How are offers submitted — fax, email, phone call? Where, to whom? How does it work? What is a script auction or a rights auction?”

**Craig:** Uh…I’m guessing that this is… — A script auction, I believe, has to do with the purchasing of a library of material from a company. In other words, a company is going out of business and being sold.

**John:** Yeah. In this case he is talking about spec scripts.

**Craig:** Oh…

**John:** I think what he is talking about is there is the situation where something becomes a bidding more on a spec. So, let’s say you wrote a spec script that suddenly everybody wants. And it gets to the point where you are getting offers from different people. I used to hear about this more. Maybe it still does happen where at some point the agents will say, “Okay, we are going to start at 5pm and say to just start bidding. And people can call in and say how high they will go.” And they will set a time limit on it.

**Craig:** Yeah. To that, there is no rocket science. Basically if it is a hot property, and everybody knows about it, then you just say, “We start fielding calls at this hour, and we will let you know what the highest offer is. And if you want to match it or exceed it, go for it.”

Sometimes the companies, in an effort to short circuit a kind of endlessly spiraling competition will say, “I’m going to offer you $1 million for this. You have to take it or leave it right now, or I am out.” They do all sorts of things.

There are script auctions and rights auctions that occur when companies are being bought and sold. For instance, famously The Terminator rights were auctioned off. And those occur the way assets are auctioned off for any business, when they have to disperse assets. But, probably he is talking about what you are talking about.

**John:** In the case of those big bundle of rights assets, there you would need to know, you have to pre-qualify as a bidder. They have to know that you actually could buy at the price that you are talking about. There would be all sorts of terms and things. But if you just wrote a normal spec script, that is not going to go out as auction in a meaningful way. It is not like Christie’s. It’s not like they say, “We have a new spec script from this writer you have never heard about,” that people can read. That doesn’t happen.

**Craig:** Nope.

**John:** You are just desperate for anyone to read that script if it is somebody you have never heard of before.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** This I am going to read just because this came in with the whole bundle of questions. This is a guy named Josh. He wrote in, “Cool blog. Went there to wash sneaks. CAngel Full Throttle was excellent!!”

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** And God bless him. He kept it all in the subject line. There was no text that went with it.

**Craig:** Oh, no, no. Why would there be text? The subject line is there for you to write your entire thing. Yeah.

**John:** But there was punctuation, Craig, I should point out. There were two exclamation points at the very, very end.

**Craig:** Oh. Well, do me a favor. Read that again, because I got C. Angels 2, I think, or C. Angels, but say it again one more time.

**John:** Because when I first read it, I read it as “Cangel.” I’m like, what is “Cangel?”

**Craig:** Oh, it could be Cangel which was a very good movie. But start from the beginning.

**John:** “Cool blog. Went there to wash sneaks. CAngel Full Throttle was excellent!!”

**Craig:** I’m sorry, watch or wash sneaks?

**John:** Wash sneaks. So, this is something, it is esoteric information that as the person who wrote the blog I can tell you, is I have a random blog post on there that says, “You can wash sneakers.” Because no one every washes their sneakers, but you totally can wash sneakers and they look so much better. And things that you would normally throw out are actually quite wearable again after washing them in the washing machine.

So he probably had Googled “washing sneakers,” ended up on my blog. Saw that I wrote Charlie’s Angels Full Throttle, and that was the movie that he wanted to comment how much he loved.

**Craig:** Cangels.

**John:** Cangel Full Throttle.

**Craig:** Cangel Full Throttle.

**John:** Cangel Full Throttle is due for a remake, I think.

**Craig:** Um…thanks, Josh.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Cool blog!

**John:** So this is a segue for me internally, not to hold it against him, which is a phrase… — Or, actually here is the phrase: let’s not hold that against him. Sometimes in blog posts my name will come up, and they will say, “John August, who wrote Charlie’s Angels Full Throttle, but let’s not hold that against him.”

**Craig:** [laughs] Right.

**John:** It’s the weirdest, most backhanded thing. First off, if you are going to cherry pick one credit just to put for me, you are going to put the sequel to Charlie’s Angels as my credit?

**Craig:** But let’s not hold that against him. And the reason we have to advise you not to hold that against him is because it was a terrible crime.

**John:** It was a crime against cinema.

**Craig:** What a bad thing you did, John. Boo!

**John:** What a terrible, awful thing I did.

**Craig:** But let’s show our humanity and our magnanimity by advising everyone to not hold it against you.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because holding it against you would be an understandable action. Let’s hold that movie against you.

**John:** Yeah, it’s like a genocide, but it is a film that someone could choose to watch, or not watch, at their time. And there is actually a better movie that stars the same movie, called Charlie’s Angels, that is also available for watching. If you like Charlie’s Angels, and don’t like the sequel, that’s okay. You can just watch the first one.

**Craig:** I don’t even think we need to go to genocide. Let’s just start with the most mild crime we can think of. Shoplifting.

**John:** Yeah. Okay.

**Craig:** What’s worse — Cangel or shoplifting? I’m going to say shoplifting. I’m going to say there literally isn’t one single thing for which there is some kind of statute that is worse than writing the worst movie in the world.

People need to shut up.

**John:** Oh, you know where people also need to shut up? They need to shut up in freaking movie theaters.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, I went to go see Hunger Games here in Times Square, and yeah, I’m sort of asking for it, going to see a movie in Times Square, but that’s where I was. And so I saw the movie.

So I saw it opening day. Or I saw it the Friday that it opened. And it was a packed house. And I really, really enjoyed the movie. I did not enjoy, first off, the two women who got into a fist fight before the movie began.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** Which is not great.

**Craig:** Maybe they were hungry.

**John:** They were hungry. They were hungry for some…

**Craig:** Games.

**John:** Movies. But the guy next to me, the stranger who was sitting next to me decided that he had to sort of provide commentary on what he was seeing the whole time through. And I originally thought, “Oh, he must be with somebody and he is talking to that person.”

But, no. he was just sort of talking to me, or sort of anyone who could hear, and providing his sort of like, “Well that’s a dumb choice.” “Oh, come on, fire the cinematographer,” because it was all shaky cams.

**Craig:** Are you kidding? Really? He was doing that?

**John:** He was doing that.

**Craig:** I mean, because I understand the whole, “Bitch, don’t go in there!” But, I mean, now you have a film student mocking the movie next to you? Shut up!

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, come on! What a jerk.

**John:** Yeah. So anyway, that guy — you are a jerk. But, I’m in the middle of the theater, and this is two-thirds of the way through, so I am not going to actually… — It did tamper my enjoyment. Tamper? It muted my enjoyment somewhat of The Hunger Games. But I did quite like it, except for that person next to me.

And as the lights came up, he kind of turned to me to get agreement from me. I’m like, “No, I want to stab you. That is actually how I am feeling now.”

**Craig:** I always say to those people… — I will just say to them, “Hey, come on man, please.”

**John:** My husband will speak up, but then it becomes extra awkward.

**Craig:** I love the awkwardness. It actually makes the movie better for me. And it is hard on a movie like that, because I would imagine it was a packed house. But I will get up and change seats. Anything to get away from idiots.

**John:** Oh, yeah. In a normal situation I would do that.

**Craig:** Idiots, yeah. I remember my wife… — I didn’t see The Sixth Sense with my wife. For some reason we saw it separately. And she said the moment came in the movie where he is…

**John:** Say spoiler…

**Craig:** He remembers. Oh, spoiler alert, in case you haven’t seen that movie. [laughs] The moment comes where he is sort of flashing back and he sees the ring, and he realizes that he has been dead the whole time, and in the middle of that interesting montage where the filmmaker has cleverly designed a cinematic way to slowly shine the light on you, this older woman behind her, who was with her older female friend says in a loud whisper, “He doesn’t know he’s dead.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Got to love that. Just, way to kill it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** “He doesn’t know he’s dead.”

**John:** They make television who need to talk back to the screen.

**Craig:** They also make guns for people who need to talk back to the screen.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Yeah, one of the great spoof moments in spoof history is in the first Scary Movie, the Keenen Ivory Wayans’ Scary Movie where Regina Hall, a terrific actor, is playing the stereotypical black girl who must yell at the screen, at everything. And the audience all participates in stabbing her to death. [laughs]

**John:** I remember that.

**Craig:** Yeah. It was great. It was really great.

**John:** All right, the next question. Austin, who turns out we actually know people in common; we know some very tall women who are dancers in common. He writes in to say, “My partner and I were taken on at a management company,” whose name I will redact, “after they read our glorious first outing. It was a good script, but they didn’t want to make it, nor did their partners at Alcon. What they did want was for us to go off and write Bridesmaids Part 2, or the Hangover Again, or Bad Teacher Even Worse, or some other been-there/done-that thing.”

**Craig:** God forbid you write a sequel to a movie like that. [laughs]

**John:** As I read more about it, it is sort of a dense paragraph here. I think it was that they wanted him to write that same kind of movie. They weren’t literally saying, “Write the sequel to that movie.” They were saying, “Write exactly that kind of movie.”

**Craig:** Got it. And they don’t want to.

**John:** They basically didn’t want to. “They turned in outline after outline, high concept for high concept for high concept, piled like cord wood in the WGA Registry. And ultimately this producer/management company dropped us. Here we are six months later with our brilliant original first outing, plus additional treasurer’s trove of stories to be told. We have no connections in this world, other than the producers that just cut the cord.

I read that poorly, but you got the idea of what it is. So, you know what? That’s going to happen a lot. I would say 75% of working screenwriters had exactly that situation, where there was initial spark of interest from somebody who seemed real, who liked your stuff, and you worked your ass off to try to make them happy. They couldn’t be made happy, you weren’t made happy, and you parted ways.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s far from a rare circumstance. Although, there is a lesson here: don’t chase. And producers — particularly producers — are notorious for chasing. The Hangover happened in spite of quite a bit of resistance. Bridesmaids, I imagine, happened in the face of some amount of resistance. Almost every surprise hit comedy, particularly in comedy, seems to happen counter to what everyone is chasing. And you can see these kinds of cycles that come and go in comedy.

Right now we are in this kind of Rated R comedy for grownups phase. And we will at some point return to — because these things are cyclical, the kind of character-driven, broader PG-13 comedies that ruled the world in the ’90s. But producers chase because, just a little primer on the economics of producing. Producers don’t get paid to develop. They get paid some sort of insultingly small amount of money. It doesn’t support them. It doesn’t keep them going. All they get paid really is to produce an actual money. It needs to get green lit. It needs to be made.

So they are desperate to give the studios what the studios want to make. However, what that often leads producers to do is chase. Therefore, they then put that on you, especially newer writers who they feel they can absolutely tell anything to, and who will… — Finally here are writers that won’t look at me and go, “No, dummy, I’m going to do what I want.”

So then they force those writers to join the hunt in chasing. If you feel yourself chasing, you are never going to win. You have to write something you actually like, that you actually believe in, that you have actual passion for. And that doesn’t mean that it must be artistic or dramatic. It could also mean the dumbest comedy in the world. But you have to love the dumb comedies. And you have to love that style of movie.

Write what you love. If you, and this is a tough one because we are constantly put in our place as the peons, and yet we really are the leaders. We must lead everyone to something new and good.

**John:** You have to remember that screenwriting is essentially the research and development of the film industry. And there is a lag time. So by the time that the Hangovers, and all the R-rated comedies have become incredibly successful, well you could back up like three years before that that they actually started to go through the process.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So if you write a brand new one right now, it is going to be another three years, and that cycle will have passed. It feels very much like all the people, the other companies are trying to make an iPad competitor. Well, they are racing to try to catch up with where the iPad is right now, but the iPad is going to be, again, better by the time they are done with this thing.

So they end up releasing a tablet that would have been, “Oh, that would have been okay a year ago.”

**Craig:** Right. And meanwhile Apple, the iPad to them, that’s a small department where that makes minor iterations. The thing that they are going to come out within a year or two, everyone is going to go, “Wait, wait, wait, what?!” And then they are going to go chase that.

And that is what you kind of have to do. And all of the work that I have done that I sort of look at and go, “Huh, I don’t know if that was a good idea,” which is quite a bit of it, was me being involved in a chase. And getting enlisted in a chase. But it took me a long time, and many, many mistakes, and iffy to bad choices to arrive at a place where I understood that that wasn’t going to do anybody any good. And that — just write what you really want to.

And, look, we don’t have to be precious about it. There are a lot of things that get us excited to write. And we can choose to write something that excites us that we also know other people might be excited by. There’s nothing wrong with that. But when you sit down with these guys, and I am really speaking to the newer writers now, and these producers tell you in no uncertain terms that they are not making this kind of movie, and they are not making that kind of movie, they are only making this kind — just understand: they don’t know what they are talking about. None of them do.

Robert Towne, or was it William Goldman? Robert Towne? “No one knows anything.” Robert Towne? I think it was Robert Towne.

**John:** I think it was William Goldman.

**Craig:** William Goldman. We will give it to William Goldman. “No one knows anything” is absolutely true.

**John:** But, we do know the answer to this question, or at least we have two good answers to this next question. Stephen asks about formatting Shakespeare. “When adapting something like Shakespeare to a screenplay, does the original dialogue of the play get formatted like just normal dialogue, or do you do something different with it to show the verses?”

**Craig:** Oh…

**John:** You have written a lot of Shakespeare-based screenplays.

**Craig:** Uh… [laughs]

**John:** So, I will tell you my answer. If a bulk of your screenplay is going to be in verse, you treat it like as if it was going to be sung. And you are going to have to do something with it so that the lines of text make sense with the… — The end of a line makes sense.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so you may end up doing that thing which I do on some lyrics is I sort of cheat the margins out a little bit, and I put things in. Like Verdana or something. 11-point Verdana. Something a little bit smaller so that the lines can actually line up right.

**Craig:** But this is a whole script, right?

**John:** Yeah. Or you can do this thing which is what a stage play does which is when you get to that kind of stuff, you just really block over it like a lot more left, so you can get the whole line in. And you do the true line breaks the way they would be.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** If you are just doing sort of like Shakespearean-like dialogue, and it doesn’t actually have to — the meter or the rhyme doesn’t matter so much, just make it dialogue.

**Craig:** Yeah. I guess if I were to sit down and do it, I would probably keep the margins basically the same. I’m talking about adapting directly from Shakespeare. So I am pulling the dialogue from the play. Shift-return would be my friend. So, when you shift-return in screenwriting software, it doesn’t advance to the next element; it just does a character return within the element. But I would probably do little combinations. If there were short lines, “To be or not to be, that is the question.” I would probably… — Well, even that one I would probably shift-return. It’s a pretty big one.

But, you know, you need to be able to break it up a little bit so people can get a sense of the meter and rhyme as you just described.

**John:** And you have to remember that even if you are using a chunk of Shakespearean dialogue, you still are writing a screenplay, and so you are going to probably break it up in a different way than how Shakespeare would break it up. You are not going to put huge chunks there, because you will probably be interceding it with action and other stuff so that it really is a screenplay.

**Craig:** It’s an interesting question. You know, I think the smart thing to do would be to see if you can hunt down a copy of one of Branagh’s adaptations. Or…

**John:** John Logan just did Coriolanus.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. There you go. See if you can track down Logan’s script and see how one of the professionals did it. It’s a really good question. I don’t know.

And nor will I ever have to know. [laughs]

**John:** I’m going to end with a really easy one today.

**Craig:** Yay!

**John:** Tea asks, “Do you have any advice for writing a scene with numerous characters? It is getting confusing who is saying what to whom, and who they are. Is there a limit to labeling people stereotypically just for clarity sake? This scene is in a holding cell with about 23 people and I cannot omit anybody.” [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs] Wait, do they all speak?

**John:** I guess so. So, here’s the thing, the first half of the question is completely reasonable.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And so sometimes there is a… — Don’t say Guard Number 2, Guard Number 3 very much, especially if they are talking to each other. It’s good to have a little shorthand for who that person is. And sometimes you will even see this in the movie scroll. You will see like, you know, Old Lady with Bag, or a character who has a weird name which is really kind of their action.

**Craig:** Or like Sleepy Guard, or Short Guard.

**John:** Sleepy Guard, yes. And that is fine, and fair, and good, because it helps keep things more clear. But, yes, there is a limit. And there is a limit to how many people can be in a scene and actually talk. Because an audience can’t keep track of that many people. So if people are just piping out one line, it is okay to not even introduce them. And just give them the line. And, so, “SHARECROPPER: He’s a monster.” That’s fine.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And you don’t have to sort of keep track. You don’t have to introduce them. You don’t have to say anything about them.

**Craig:** I mean, look, there is so much… — That question took such a hard left into crazy town.

**John:** You can’t have 23 people in a scene…

**Craig:** No! Let’s just start there. Let’s just start with the creative thing.

**John:** …and have any sense of how you are keeping track of people.

**Craig:** No. There is no scene with 23 people talking. That doesn’t exist. In movie history there has never been a scene where 23 individual people spoke in the scene.

There is something terribly wrong with your scene. Nobody is interested in hearing from 23 different people. Frankly, that means there is 23 lines of dialogue at a minimum if they only say one thing. That is a really, really long scene already. So I am bored and confused, and I don’t understand why the screenwriter isn’t focusing my attention on what matters.

So, there is sort of a failure of authorial intent there. But, let me also say this: putting aside whether there are 23 people, or 10 people, or 8, when you become a screenwriter that writes for production, the first time you go through it you will become attune to the concept of the day player. When they make movies, there are actors, and the actors that we think of as stars. But then there are what they call day players — people who show up to do that one or two lines.

A typical scene is your star walks into a 7-11, asks for a cup of coffee, and the clerk says, “I’m sorry, sir, we are out.” And the star storms out upset. Well, that guy is a day player. He has got one line. “I’m sorry, sir, we are out.” Day players, by and large, aren’t the best. It is hard to rely on them to be interesting. So you really need to limit what they say.

If you have a scene where 23 people are talking, and we are not going to see them again, obviously. They are all day players, or half of them are day players, not only do you have a scene that is populated by actors that don’t really command the screen normally, but you are also paying each one of those people a lot of money. And productions hate day players. They try and minimize day players as much as possible. They will go through the script and they will say, “Do we need this guy to actually say this line? Or can he just walk up, try and get a cup of coffee, and there is a sign that says ‘No Coffee Today?'”

So, no. No with the 23. What?! [laughs] No. If you are having trouble sorting it through, trust me, the audience will have an even bigger trouble sorting it through.

**John:** So I am trying to think of situations where you could have 23 characters in a scene. And there is a possibility. Like late in a story, like let say you have met a bunch of different people and they all, it’s like a Cannonball Run kind of movie, where you met a bunch of different people. Or Airplane, where there is a bunch of people in Airplane, and they are all in a similar space. And so they could conceivably, in a scene, everyone could…

**Craig:** There is no way. There’s no way. Think about it. 23 lines of dialogue. That is the minimum.

**John:** He’s not promising that all 23 people are going to speak all at the same time.

**Craig:** In the scene — they all have a line, right?

**John:** I will reread the question. “It is confusing who is saying what to who, and who they are. Is there…” I guess, yeah.

What I was going to say is there are going to be cases where you have introduced people separately, and they are coming into a bigger group. And there is a concept of keeping people alive in a scene. And sometimes you will notice, and this is important — this is actually one of the reasons why a table read is really good. You realize that a character is in a scene, but hasn’t said anything for a page and a half. And that’s bad.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Because in real life, people do say something. And so, “Okay, I need to give that person a line here, or get them out of the scene because it is just weird to have a person standing around there.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I can envision some scenarios in which a bunch of people have come together at sort of the end of a thing, or as like a big rally, and people have come together. And so we know all of those people are there, but not everyone is going to get a line. You are still going to end up treating those people like blocks of people.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So it is going to be that the Mad Mothers are there. And it is going to be the Drunk Fraternity Brothers over there. And it is going to be the Kickboxing Team over there. And one person from each of those things is going to be talking in the scene.

**Craig:** Correct. You will never get to 23. I don’t care if it is the end of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. You are never going to get there. It is never going to happen. It is bad filmmaking. I don’t even know how you direct that, frankly. [laughs] It’s just impossible.

**John:** Yeah. Every person you add to a scene — this is a useful thing to talk about. Like let’s say you have two people at a dinner table, and they are having a conversation. That is fairly straight-forward. You are going to have to cover — you will get masters, you will get each side, you will get some establishing. A minimum of three shots, probably more.

**Craig:** You have got your master, mini-master, over the shoulders, close-ups, extreme close-ups. I mean, you could make a meal out of it. But even if you are… — If you are doing 23 people, the problem is either they are all standing in a freaking clump, like in an audience, at which point why are 23 people in an audience?

You just won’t know where to focus your attention. Just think about it from the audience’s point of view. Who am I listening to? Who am I following? Who do I care about? The audience has the capacity for five or six voices, maybe seven, I don’t know. At some point it gets a little crazy.

**John:** So, wrapping up, maybe we will start doing this every week. I want to talk about one thing this week that I loved. Do you have anything this week that you loved?

**Craig:** Um, you say your thing.

**John:** I will say my thing, and then you can talk.

**Craig:** Is your thing me?

**John:** [laughs] It’s you, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** I love you. I don’t say that often enough.

**Craig:** You really don’t. Or ever. Yeah.

**John:** I love to apologize. I love to tell people I love them.

The thing I loved this week — I saw Once, the Broadway musical version of Once. So, Once is the Irish film that had Falling Slowly in it, and got Oscar nominations, and I think won some good awards. And I loved the movie. I really loved the show.

So the Broadway show of it is the story of the movie, which means it is very small and slight. And you would think it would just disappear at any moment. But what really struck me about it is how literal — it’s not literal… — Theater can be presentational or representational. Representational means that you recognize what space — it can be acting style, too — but you recognize what space you are in. So, if you are in a post office, it will sort of look like a post office. And then you are someplace else and it is going to look to look like a bedroom.

So in Once, you go in there and as you enter the theater it is this Irish bar setup. And it looks like it fills the whole stage. And you are actually able to go up onto the stage and order a drink. And there are people that they are playing music. And then eventually the show kind of starts, but the lights are still on, and you start to realize, “Oh, the people that are playing music are actually the actors.”

And they never leave the stage. And that set is actually the only set. And they never… — So if characters are going someplace else, they are still in that same set, and everyone is still in the thing, and you are just creating the reality of this moment. Like, this piano comes in, and we are in a music store. And it’s fascinating.

Coming from a screenwriting perspective, where things tend be very…

**Craig:** Literal.

**John:** …literal, it’s nice to experience things where you just have to — you are asking your audience to use their imagination and trust that these people are in their own space. And that they will do the set dressing themselves in whichever way, and they will ignore the people who are sitting at the edges of the stage until they start playing, or singing, and that’s okay that they can do that at any given moment.

Sometimes, like Lars von Trier made Dogville, I guess, which sort of did that same thing, where everyone was around the whole time. But in a movie it is just really, really strange. And in theater you can get away with it. I recommend the show, but I also recommend just thinking about the difference between literality and representing something, versus sort of presenting what something is. It is very hard in a movie to have a space where like I am not sure where I am.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Even if you are filming in Toronto for Washington, DC, you know that you are supposed to be in Washington, DC. And if you don’t have a sense of what this place is supposed to be, you are really uncomfortable as an audience member.

**Craig:** That’s right. You are not sure where the ground is beneath your feet. Correct. But I do like when films adapt musicals or plays, sometimes they borrow that. For instance, when Rob Marshall did Chicago, I’m thinking of the He Had it Coming sequence. Clearly he went for that sort of representational.

He shot a scene that could have been on stage.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And yet it was in the movie, and you were okay because he moved in and out, and it was actually a very smart way of transitioning from the non-musical portions of the movie into the musical portions. You would leave the literal representation and enter this kind of interesting representational space.

**John:** If you were watching Smash you would know that they use that conventional as well.

**Craig:** Huge if. The big if. [laughs]

**John:** Big if. If you are watching Smash you would know that what tends to happen is they are starting to rehearse a musical number, and then it will go into one of the actor’s perspectives, and it will come out as the full production as they sort of see it. And then it will go back to the little version.

**Craig:** Yeah. Actually, now that I am thinking about it, it is kind of a time-tested cinematic device, when the director wants you to divorce yourself from the reality. For instance, if you watch the old Danny Kaye movie, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, when he goes into his Mitty daydreams, it becomes a set. It is quite clearly a set. And it is representational. It is not meant to be real or literal. And then he comes back to his life, and it is real and literal.

**John:** Anything that you loved that you want to share?

**Craig:** You know, I think a lot of people love this, but last night for the 4 billionth time I watched Casino, the Martin Scorsese movie. And I feel like sometimes Casino gets a little overlooked in the shadow of Goodfellas, which I truly love, because.. — And I remember even when I saw Casino in theaters, I thought, “Oh, this is cool. It is sort of like Goodfellas Part 2. And everybody is kind of doing the same thing.”

You know, De Niro is kind of the crafty one, and Pesci is the loose cannon, and it is mobsters and it is ’70s classic rock soundtracks, and corruption, and grifting, and money, and they all come to a bad end. But, there is something wonderful about Casino that is separate and apart from Goodfellas. There is almost, in a strange way, a little more tragedy to it. And I have to say that, what’s her name? [laughs]

**John:** Sharon Stone.

**Craig:** Sharon Stone. Sharon Stone is spectacular in that movie.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Really, really, really good. And there are wonderful moments in that film. Really great stuff. And there is a sequence… — The other thing is, everybody is very familiar with the sequence in Goodfellas when De Niro’s character, Jimmy Conway, I believe, is starting to kill all of the people that assisted him in the Lufthansa heist.

And the soundtrack that plays over it is that great coda to Layla, by Eric Clapton. But in Casino, there is this amazing sequence where they show — where Scorsese shows Pesci and his guys just kind of going nuts, and robbing everybody, and forgetting all the rules about what it means to kind of stay — keep their heads down in this new Wild West of Vegas. And he uses Can’t You Hear Me Knocking by the Stones.

And I think he plays the whole song. It’s a really long song. And it is really great. So, Casino, I think, probably gets its due from a lot of people, but maybe not as many. I love that movie.

**John:** I haven’t seen it in years. I remember loving it when it came out. And I just remember the sunshine of it. I just remember it being light and sunny in a way that you don’t expect a movie that is going to have the things that it has in it.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, and it’s a great choice. And you can see that choice echoed in The Hangover, because I remember when I was talking with Todd about The Hangover, he said it was actually a very important thing to him to show Vegas in the sun, because most movies about Vegas show it at night. It’s so much more glamorous, and interesting, and lit up at night.

**John:** With Go we shot at night. It’s exactly what you want to see.

**Craig:** Yeah. But if you are kind of shooting a little bit of a tragedy, a Vegas tragedy, in the daylight Vegas is pretty grim. It is sort of the opposite of most cities where at night they seem grim. Vegas in the daylight is dirty and dusty and a bit absurd, frankly.

**John:** It’s the woman who is kind of hot when the lights are dim, but then you turn on lights and it is, “Oh my God!”

**Craig:** Yeah. And the Vegas sun is…[police sirens] Oh, there they go. The Vegas sun is truly bad light. And all the artifice of Vegas is exposed for what it is, which is just cheap.

But at night, I have got to say, at night the Venetian looks quite beautiful.

**John:** It does.

**Craig:** In the daytime it just looks dumb. And for a movie about how Vegas is entirely about a kind of false presentation, and what the reality is behind it, it was great that so much of it was during the day. Not much at night. Good call.

**John:** Nice. Great. So, Once and Casino. And one of them is a Broadway musical, and Casino probably wouldn’t be a very good Broadway musical.

**Craig:** No. No. No.

**John:** We will wrap up here, but I was talking with someone else today. It’s odd that there isn’t a Goodfellas or a Godfather of Broadway musicals. And his theory was that the violence just doesn’t work on stage in the way that you would want it to work.

**Craig:** That’s true.

**John:** It’s strange that that mafia stuff hasn’t become a central uniting principal of a Broadway show.

**Craig:** Well, and I must say that breaking into song is sort of a natural… [laughs]. Naturally undercuts the immediacy and the visceral reaction you want to get from violence.

**John:** Because the Sharks and the Jets, while terrific dancers, are not as threatening…

**Craig:** No. Even Sondheim could not craft lyrics that made those guys actually sound dangerous.

**John:** [singsong] Da-da, da-da-da. Dada.

**Craig:** Yeah. It just comes off, I don’t want to say “gay.”

**John:** No. You need to not say that. It comes off as less threatening. It’s hard to feel like you are in that much danger when people are singing.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know what it is? It’s silly. It’s a silly combination. If you are a killer, you don’t dance and sing, frankly. I feel like killers never performed in their productions in school. And they don’t sing. They are just killers. So, yeah, that’s a tough one.

**John:** Cool. Craig, thank you for another fun podcast.

**Craig:** That was a good one.

**John:** We went into this with absolutely nothing to talk about, and we ended up talking about a lot of things.

**Craig:** We always do. Yeah. And I sang for Stuart while you took a break in the middle there.

**John:** That was very nice for him. I’m sure he appreciated it. Craig, actually, people should know, has a lovely voice. I have heard him sing a nice Broadway song.

**Craig:** Thank you. I was not doing particularly well when I was singing to Stuart. [laughs] But one day I will sing for everybody on the podcast. It will be lovely.

**John:** Lovely. Maybe when we do our live episode. We can do our stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah! There you go. Excellent. Oh, wait, before you go, one last thing. One last thing. As you know, and I suppose many of our listeners know, I am an avid fan of SiriusXM on Broadway, the satellite radio show tunes channel. And you are working on Broadway, and somehow or another I really want you to get on Seth Rudetsky’s show. I feel this is important to me.

By the way, is Big Fish, it’s a musical so there is no reason you shouldn’t be on Seth Rudetsky’s show. Seth Rudetsky is sort of like 80% of the DJing of that channel. And for whatever reason I am just so taken with this guy. He just cracks me up. And I learn a lot from him, and I am a big fan of his. But I don’t do musicals, so I am not going to be with him. But you have got to get on his show. For me.

**John:** I will work on it. I feel like we need to be closer to actually being a show-show. Closer down to being a show that people can buy tickets for, and then I will work on that.

**Craig:** Yeah. But when you get there, you have to do it. For me.

**John:** Come on, I will.

**Craig:** For me.

**John:** It’s a promise.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Craig, thank you again.

**Craig:** Thank you. We’ll see you next time. Bye.

**John:** Bye.